Academic literature on the topic 'Freyer Theater (Berlin, Germany)'

In this article Steve Earnest discusses contemporary approaches to performance training in Germany, comparing the content and methods of selected programmes from the former Federal Republic of Germany to those of the former German Democratic Republic. The Hochschule für Musik und Theater Rostock and the University of the Arts in Berlin are here utilized as primary sources, while reference is also made to the Bayerische Theater-akademie ‘August Everding’ Prinzregententheater in Munich, the Hochschule für Musik und Theater ‘Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy’ in Leipzig, and Justus Leibig Universität in Giessen. The aim is to provide insight into theatre-training processes in Germany and to explore how these relate to the national characteristics that have emerged since reunification. Steve Earnest is Associate Professor of Theatre at Coastal Carolina University in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. His publications include The State Acting Academy of East Berlin (Mellen Press, 1999) and articles in Performer Training (Harwood Publishers, 2001), New Theatre Quarterly, Theatre Journal, and Western European Stages.

The paper is devoted to the consideration of Russian theatrical activity in Berlin during 1919-1923, when Berlin was the focus of Russian theater life abroad, and active creative exchange between German and Russian cultures took place in this connection. The problem of exporting Russian art culture to Western countries is of interest for both domestic and foreign researchers. Among the topical problems on this issue, the Russian theater plays an important role. The study of this issue gives an idea of the potential of Russian culture in a different social and cultural environment. In the center of the research is the process of formation and development of Russian theatrical life in the German cultural environment. The author made an attempt to identify and disclose the main artistic directions of the Russian theater in Berlin in 1919-1923 and determine their role in bringing Germany to the achievements of national culture. The work uses materials from the memoirs of contemporaries and periodicals. On the basis of these sources it is shown that the theater played one of the fundamental roles in preserving the Russian cultural community and their cultural appearance on the overseas. Russian theatrical seasons contributed to the Wests involvement in the achievements of Russian culture and the establishment of cultural and artistic ties between Germany and Soviet Russia. Thus, the activities of the Russian migr and touring Russian theater in Berlin in 1919-1923 reflected the high potential of Russian culture in the conditions of a foreign social environment.

This article focuses on an incident of censorship and police intervention at the Königstädtische Theater in Berlin in 1828, occasioned by a performance of Gotthilf August von Maltitz'sThe Old Student(Der alte Student). Identifying how the playwright and his actors sought to represent political topics onstage allows me to explore how theatre functioned as a potential player in an incipient public sphere. In turn this reveals how the desire to represent political topics onstage and to become a performative player in the public sphere was already under way in the 1820s, well before the revolutionary turbulence of 1848.

Christoph Schlingensief (1960–2010) was a filmmaker, theatre director, and performance artist. In his Hamlet at the Schauspielhaus in Zürich in 2001 – his only staging of a classic – Schlingensief deployed the strategies of intervention typical of his whole work. In this article Thomas Irmer focuses on the actors' troupe in the play, performed by former neo-Nazis. Schlingensief was asking whether an audience would accept the reintegration of people who were determined to leave this extremist group with the support of the German government. At the same time, Schlingensief referred to a historical performance of Hamlet by Gustaf Gründgens, whose career in Nazi and post-war Germany is played in counterpoint against the neo-Nazi outsiders potentially to be reintegrated. Schlingensief's ambivalence here challenged ready-made opinions about overlap between political and aesthetic experience. Thomas Irmer is a scholar, theatre critic, and co-director of four documentary films on theatre, including Die Bühnenrepublik: Theatre in the GDR (2003) and Heiner Müller: a Biographical Portrait (2009). He teaches American theatre at the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies at the Freie Universität in Berlin. He is a regular contributor to Theater Heute, editor of the book Castorf's Volksbühne (2003), and author of the forthcoming Life and Times of Andrzej T. Wirth.

Over the last three decades the work of Peter Zadek in Germany has consistently aroused strong reactions, whether of lavish enthusiasm or disdainful rejection (Peter Stein is supposed to have commented that Zadek's productions of Shakespeare were ‘Shakespeare with his trousers down’). Whatever the critical reception, Zadek's work demands close attention for its free-wheeling, unpredictable, and dangerous qualities, as well as for the remarkably sensitive interplay he achieves between his actors. If Stein's productions at the Schaubühne and elsewhere are masterpieces of formal perfection, Zadek's work by contrast is characterized by a flamboyant, imaginative exploration of the text and a healthy suspicion of polished results. In the interview which follows, Roy Kift discussed with Peter Zadek not only his attitudes to the problems of acting, but also his opinions on German theatre and literature and the experiences which shaped his development as one of West Germany's leading directors. Roy Kift has been living in West Berlin since 1981, where he has written plays for stage and radio and a prizewinning opera libretto, as well as directing for theatre and television. His article on the GRIPS Theater in Berlin appeared in TQ 39 (1981).

Theatre in the German Democratic Republic was an essential part of the state propaganda machine and was strictly controlled by the cultural bureaucracy and by the party. Until the early sixties, ancient plays were rarely staged. In the sixties, classical Greek drama became officially recognised as part of cultural heritage. Directors free to stage the great classical playwrights selected ancient plays, on one hand, to escape the grim socialist reality, on the other to criticise it using various forms of Aesopian language. Two important dramatists and three examples of plays are presented and discussed: an adaptation of an Aristophanic comedy (Peter Hack’s adaptation of Aristophanes’ Peace at the Deutsche Theater in Berlin in 1962), a play based on a Sophoclean tragedy (Heiner Müller’s Philoktet, published in 1965, staged only in 1977), and a short didactic play (Lehrstück) based on Roman history (Heiner Müller’s Der Horatier, written in 1968, staged in 1973 in Hamburg in West Germany, and in the GDR only in 1988). At the end there is a brief look at a production of Aeschylus Seven against Thebes at the BE in 1969.

The exiled character in need of asylum is a recurrent theme in ancient Greek tragedy. In many of these plays, we see uprooted and homeless persons seeking sanctuary, and for the ancient Greeks, hospitality was an important issue. Many of these plays have been updated to comment on the current social and political conditions of refugees and often reflect on the notion of hospitality, something which both Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida considered to be fundamental to ethics. Recently there has been a series of demonstrations and occupations of public spaces by asylum seekers that has gained considerable news coverage. In Austria a group of about sixty refugees (from the Afghanistan-Pakistan border area) occupied the famous Votiv church in the middle of Vienna in 2012 and went on hunger strike. In Germany a large group of asylum seekers marched from various parts of the country to Berlin where they occupied the square at the Brandenburg Gate before being allowed to establish a tent community in Kreuzberg. In Hamburg a group of 80 asylum seekers who came to Germany via Lampedusa found refuge in St Pauli church, and it was there that Nicholas Stemann presented a first reading of Elfriede Jelinkek’s play Die Schutzbefohlenen in September 2013. More recently right-wing groups have mounted weekly marches through Dresden to call for a halt to immigration, and these have been contested by simultaneous counter-demonstrations in favour of immigrants and refugees. In this paper I will consider several adaptations of Greek tragedy that highlight cultural encounters between the local population and those arriving from abroad who are looking for asylum. In particular I will examine Stemann’s production that has been running at the Thalia Theater in Hamburg since September 2014, and features asylum seekers from Lampedusa on stage who beg the audience for the right to remain in Germany.

German and Polish theatre in the initial period of the political transformation.During the first theatre seasons of the nineties, German drama focused on the analysis of the social traumas following the fall of the Berlin Wall, German reunification and perestroika. However, it soon became apparent that the theatre was not able to keep pace with the political changes of the times, and it failed to do justice to their internal complications and discrepancies.The fascination with the new dramatic scenic forms originating in Germany, which could be observed in Poland in the second half of the nineties, had nothing to do with the so-called reunification drama. It more likely resulted from its fiasco and the adoption of new aesthetics and communication methods. The strengthening relation of the German and Polish theatre, i.e. joint festivals, inspired those Polish artists who sought for a new scenic language and transposed the German theatre experience into their own plays in a creative way. The scale of this movement was so extensive that it could be described as a kind of phenomenon in modern art and in relations between Poland and Germany.Das deutsche und das polnische Theater in der Anfangszeit der Systemtransformation.Die politischen Transformationen `89 hatten großen Einfluss auf die Veränderungen in Kunst und Kultur, und zwar nicht nur mit Bezug auf Deutschland und Polen, sondern vielmehr in weiten Teilen Ost- und Mittel-Osteuropas. Die deutsche Dramaturgie konzentrierte sich in den ersten Theatersaisons der 90er Jahre vorwiegend auf die Verarbeitung der aus dem Mauerfall, der Wiedervereinigung Deutschlands sowie der Perestroika resultierenden gesellschaftlichen Veränderungen in Kultur- und Künstlerkreisen wird auch ein traumatischer Zustand betont. Es zeigte sich jedoch schnell, dass das Theater weder mit dem Tempo der politischen Ereignisse mithalten noch ihren inneren Verwicklungen und Widersprüchen gerecht werden konnte. Die in Polen seit Ende der 90er Jahre beobachtete Faszination von neuen dramatisch-schauspieler­ischen Formen aus Deutschland hatte nichts mit der sogenannten Dramaturgie der Wiedervereinigung zu tun. Sie entstand vielmehr aus deren Misslingen und der Aufnahme einer neuen Ästhetik bzw. neuen Kommunikationsmethoden. Die immer enger werdenden Kontakte zwischen dem deutschen und dem polnischen Theater z. B. über gemeinsame Festivals wurden zur Inspiration für polnische Kunstschaffende, die eine neue szenische Sprache suchten und ihre Erfahrungen mit dem deutschen Theater kreativ in eigene Inszenierungen transponierten. Die Verbreitung dieser Erscheinung war so weitreichend, dass von einem Phänomen in der zeitgenössischen Kunst sowie den künstlerischen Beziehungen zwischen Polen und Deutschland gesprochen werden kann.

Strindberg’s Dramas on German Stages This article provides an overview of stage productions of Strindberg’s plays on German stages from 1890 to 2011, and discusses their importance for German directors. The first Strindberg performance to be staged in Germany was Otto Brahm’s The Father produced by the Freie Bühne in Berlin in 1890. The most suitable authors for the naturalistic aesthetic ideals of the Freie Bühne, however, were Hauptmann, Ibsen and Tolstoy. Strindberg was involved in several lawsuits during the 1890’s, making him a controversial figure. However, by the first decade of the 20th century, about twenty-five of his plays were being performed in Germany. In 1912 the so-called “Strindberg Boom” began; fifty Strindberg dramas were put on stage and the German expressionists even compared Strindberg to Shakespeare. Two theatres were of greater significance than the others. At the Deutsches Theater and the Kammerspiele Max Reinhardt – the first director able to fulfill Strindberg’s dramatic intentions in his late plays – made five legendary productions, beginning with The Dance of Death in 1912. At the Theater in Königgrätzer Straße in 1916, Rudolf Bernauer produced A Dream Play in a more idyllic and less experimental fashion than his contemporary, Reinhardt. By contrast, Reinhardt’s productions utilized lighting, sound effects and a gloomy milieu in order to emphasize the metaphysical anxiety of human beings in a world beyond their comprehension. The importance of the expressionists – and, eventually, of Strindberg himself – decreased after World War I. Given the Nazi party’s dislike of his work, Strindberg’s plays were not performed in Germany at all after 1933. The first important Strindberg production staged after World War II was Fritz Kortner’s The Father, first performed in Munich in 1949. In the 1950’s the influence of Kafka and Existentialism had revised Strindberg’s image. About ten of his plays had survived, and today, the most frequently performed of these is Miss Julie. During the 1960’s, when the German stage was dominated by political theatre, Strindberg was hardly performed at all. However, in the early 1970’s stage productions of The Dance of Death by Rudolf Noelte and The Ghost Sonata by Hans Neuenfels were the peaks of a new, ephemeral wave of interest in Strindberg. To this day, the final important German stage director possessed of a pronounced interest in Strindberg was Ernst Wendt. Wendt was, however, strongly criticized by literary scholars and translators for placing emphasis upon the destructive and depressive aspects of Strindberg’s work, and overlooking Strindberg’s role as a radical critic and an inquisitive inventor.

This article analyses the support and self-care strategies of artists from Turkey who have left their country from considerable risk regarding their country’s political and economic instability since 2013 and have relocated to Germany. It maps the support networks, programs and institutions as well as consider questions of sustainability and risk (self-) assessment. The study is based on interviews with Turkish and Kurdish artists in Germany and an analysis of the activities by the Maxim Gorki Theater, Apartment Projekt, bi’bak, Hafiza Merkezi Berlin, as well as support systems like artistic research fellowships, art residencies, artist networks and supportive theatres. The guiding questions of this study examine the longer-term orientation of the support of artists at risk. The findings show three deficiencies. Despite the variety of available support systems, artists who left Turkey experience difficulties integrating in the artistic labour market. The output-oriented, meritocratic basis on which programs select candidates often fail to help artists in a holistic way. The intergenerational disparity in the migrant communities create the infrastructures, solidarity discourses and networks for newly arriving artists, but also creates ideological tensions which limits inter-communitarian solidarity. Specific self-organized programs extend the solidarity to artists from other affected regions, which limits chances to support artists at risk from Turkey. There are generational disadvantages of newcomers in an overburdened, professionalized independent art scene that has struggled to break free from the social work and socio-cultural stigmas. The latter masks artists with a non-German background from positive discrimination initiatives. The study proposes improvement in support systems through a coordinated effort, encourages to relieve programs from a need for identity representation as an expectation or requirement, and advises a shift in support systems from output orientation towards enhancement of individuals through self-care, for greater autonomy and self-development in their art practices and new life.

This dissertation situates late nineteenth-century Berlin's reception of naturalist drama in contemporary discourse about European modernism, which to date has disregarded the significant impact of this cultural environment. Examining the Berlin avant-garde's demand for "truth" and "authenticity," this study highlights its legacy of promoting more honest and dynamic forms of human interaction. Sketching the historical background, Chapter 1 demonstrates how the reception of Henrik Ibsen in Berlin fuelled creative strategies for a more honest approach to theatre. From literary matinees to more egalitarian ways of directing theatre, this moment in cultural history significantly shaped people's understanding of theatre as a tool for social criticism and as a means of creating a sense of intimacy. Two important figures are highlighted here: literary critic and theatre director Otto Brahm, central to the promotion of naturalism, and his more prominent protégé Max Reinhardt, who developed Brahm's legacy. Situating these developments in a theoretical framework, Chapter 2 draws on the concept of "the everyday" as set out by Toril Moi, Stanley Cavell, and Ludwig Wittgenstein to link the role of the ordinary on stage to the avant-garde's search for authenticity and truthfulness. Through this framework, Ibsen's social dramas from A Doll's House to Hedda Gabler (Chapter 3) can be seen perfectly to exemplify this shift in perspective from the 1880s through the 1890s, revealing the complexity of truthfulness in communications. Tracing these themes in other dramatic works, innovative readings of Arthur Schnitzler's Liebelei (Chapter 4) and Rainer Maria Rilke's Das tägliche Leben (Chapter 5) shed new light on these two fin-de-siècle authors. By highlighting these authors' previously unrecognised connections with Berlin's avant-garde theatre scene and their dramatic exploration of interpersonal connection, this study shows both how theatre functioned as a tool to examine human relationships and to what extent twentieth-century literature was grounded in this way of thinking.

Cette thèse a pour sujet les pratiques théâtrales collectives en Allemagne au tournant des années 1960/70 et au début du XXIe siècle. Ce qui nous intéresse particulièrement, c’est l’esprit du collectif, c’est-à-dire les idées politiques et concepts esthétiques qui incitent les artistes de théâtre à pratiquer la création collective et à s’organiser en collectifs. Nous partons du principe que l’esprit du collectif s’est développé parallèlement aux mutations du monde du travail depuis la fin des années 1960, telles qu’elles sont décrites par exemple dans la publication de Luc Boltanski et Eve Chiapello : Le nouvel esprit du capitalisme. Si dans les années 1960/70, les collectifs étaient perçus unanimement comme la manière d’anticiper le socialisme théâtralement, le discours actuel au sujet des collectifs de théâtre est marqué par une hétérogénéisation des positions. Pendant que certains les considèrent comme l’avant-garde de la déréglementation néolibérale du paysage théâtral germanophone, d’autres voient se réaliser des nouvelles formes d’expression politique dans le fonctionnement collectif. Aussi bien dans les années 1960/70 qu’aujourd’hui, le travail théâtral collectif est lié à des stratégies esthétiques spécifiques, ce qui soulève la question de l’interdépendance entre les modes de production et les moyens d’expression artistiques. Cette thèse cherche à lier la réflexion sur les pratiques d’organisation et de production aux concepts esthétiques des collectifs. En s’appuyant sur une méthodologie d’analyse de discours, la thèse fait ressortir l’esprit du collectif propre aux années 1960/70 ainsi que celui qui caractérise bon nombre de formations collectives marquant le début du XXIe siècle. Se divisant en deux grandes parties, elle met en évidence les lignes de continuité ainsi que les ruptures entre les deux générations de collectifs de théâtre
This thesis focuses on collective theatrical practices in Germany in the 1960s/70s and at the beginning of the 21st century. Our particular interest is the spirit of the collective: the political ideas and aesthetic concepts that encourage theatre people to work collectively and to organize themselves as collectives. We assume that the spirit of the collective has developed in parallel with the changes in the world of work since the late 1960s as described, for example, in Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello's publication The New Spirit of Capitalism. While in the 1960s/70s, collectives were unanimously perceived as the theatrical way of anticipating socialism, the current discourse about theatre collectives is marked by a heterogenization of positions. While some see them as the vanguard of the neoliberal deregulation of the German-speaking theatre landscape, others see in the collective functioning a new form of the Political. In the 1960s/70s as well as today, collective theatre work is linked to specific aesthetic strategies, which raise the question of the interdependence between the mode of production and aesthetics. This thesis seeks to link reflection on the organizational and production practices with the aesthetic concepts of the theatre collectives. Based on a discourse analysis methodology, the thesis brings out the spirit of the collective specific to the 1960s/70s on the one hand and to the beginning of the 21st century on the other hand. Divided into two main parts, it exposes the lines of continuity as well as the ruptures between the two generations of theatre collectives
Diese Dissertationsschrift beschäftigt sich mit den Theaterkollektiven der 1960er/70er-Jahre und des 21. Jahrhunderts. Das besondere Interesse gilt dem Geist des Kollektivs, d.h. den politischen Vorstellungen und ästhetischen Konzepten, die der kollektiven Theaterarbeit zugrunde liegen. Wir gehen davon aus, dass sich der Geist des Kollektivs parallel zu den Veränderungen in der Arbeitswelt seit dem Ende der 1960er-Jahre entwickelt hat, wie sie beispielsweise Luc Boltanski und Eve Chiapello in Der Neue Geist des Kapitalismus beschreiben. Während die Theaterkollektive in den 1960er/70er-Jahren relativ einhellig als der theatrale Vorgriff sozialistischer Produktions- und Gesellschaftsstrukturen wahrgenommen wurden, ist der aktuelle Diskurs von einer Heterogenisierung der Positionen geprägt. Die heutigen Kollektive werden einerseits als die Avantgarde der neoliberalen Deregulierung der deutschsprachigen Theaterlandschaft angesehen, andererseits werden die kollektiven Arbeits- und Organisationsweisen als neue Ausdrucksformen des Politischen wahrgenommen. Sowohl in den 1960er/70er-Jahren als auch heute ist die kollektive Theaterarbeit mit spezifischen ästhetischen Strategien verknüpft, was die Frage nach der Interdependenz zwischen der Produktionsweise und den theatralen Ausdrucksmitteln aufwirft. Diese Dissertation bringt die Überlegungen zu den kollektiven Organisations- und Produktionspraktiken mit den ästhetischen Konzepten der Kollektive in Verbindung. Die Arbeit basiert auf einer diskursanalytischen Methodologie mittels derer der jeweilige Geist des Kollektivs herausgearbeitet wird, der für die Theaterkollektive der 1960er/70er-Jahre bzw. für die heutigen Kollektivformationen typisch ist. Sie gliedert sich in zwei Hauptteile und hebt, die beiden Kollektivgenerationen diachronisch untersuchend, die Kontinuitätslinien und Brüche hervor, die den neuen Geist des Kollektivs mit demjenigen der Vorgängergeneration verbinden

"Metropolitan Theatrics" charts the unsettling and reshaping of everyday life in Weimar Berlin between 1919 and 1933. It does so, by convening a conversation between the multidisciplinary insights of performance studies and recent geographical approaches to the study of the modern city. Berlin's restless relationship with the 'modern' offers, it is argued, an ideal historical milieu in which to test performance theory while at the same time question some of its presentist assumptions. Drawing on a variety of historical sources, the study focuses on the role of performance - not only theatrical representation, but also the popular press, novels, the visual and performing arts, modern dance, scientific experiments, and everyday practices - in order to demonstrate the specific conjunction of visuality and embodiment that allied 'Berlin' with 'modernity.' The thesis is divided into two main parts. Part One is a close reading of texts and images and how they have come to figure Weimar Berlin as an imagined environment. In this respect, recent scholarship in the humanities has been caught on the horns of a theoretical dilemma, namely how to accommodate the seemingly undocumentable event of performance. Different responses to this dilemma are discussed. In particular, it is argued that in seeking to go beyond representation to embodied experience, a sense of the cultural presence of the former in the latter merits greater critical attention. Part Two continues the thesis's discussion of performance's unorthodox archives by drawing attention to a repertoire of aesthetic and scientific practices which were developed to sense and adapt to the traumatic shock of metropolitan modernity. Ultimately, this thesis provides an historically specific account of aspects of Weimar modernity and thus means to contribute not only to an historical geography of Berlin, but also to the forging of methodologies that serve to widen the cross-disciplinary study of modern culture and modernity. Given the importance of the Weimar era to our understanding of the nature of European modernity, the development of a geography of performance makes a strong case for re-examining the ways in which the relationship between 'modernity' and the 'city' is usually formulated
Arts, Faculty of
Geography, Department of
Graduate

Abstract On the evening of 5 November 1989, just four days before the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Deutsches Theater in East Berlin found itself with a full house. The crowd was so large that loudspeakers had to be set up to relay proceedings to the people packed in the foyer. What brought so many East Germans out on a chilly Sunday evening? Perhaps surprisingly, the occasion was a reading from the memoirs of Walter Janka, a German veteran of the International Brigades.

Abstract Now widely acknowledged, although still casting shadows, the most pernicious myth to plague the historiography of Kurt Weill is the idea that in Germany and in American exile he was in effect two entirely different composers. The years he spent in Paris (1933–1935) between Berlin and New York put pressure on the geographically determinist “two Weills” construct. Tracing Weill’s esthetic philosophy over that period, and spotlighting the transatlantic reception of his Fantaisie Symphonique (1932–1934) this chapter considers how the middlebrow, a critical apparatus becoming increasingly robust in music studies, might illuminate the geopolitical and assimilationist discourses buried within this historiographical rift. A symphonic work from a composer known for his popular theater music catalyzed middlebrow anxieties about modernism, mass publics, class, and commercialism. To close, I suggest Weill’s historiography prompts more searching questions about the relationship between exile, immigrant narratives, and international mobility in theories of middlebrow culture.

In sacred musical works we find structures and composing solutions that introduce a specific action, similar to visual elements. What are the means for the architectural and sound space that create a sacred space? Are there playing in common? I answer this question on the basis of contemporary architecture (e.g. Church of Light by Tadao Ando in Ibaraki/Japan, Fritz Hoger�s Kirke in Berlin/Germany, Basilica Sanctuary of Our Lady of Tears by Stephane Aboudaram in Syracuse/Italy) confronted with music dedicated to the sacred sphere. In accordance with the currently developed cognitive interpretation, I will guide towards the sphere of experience and define a sacred place as an area where you can feel safe, surrounded by somewhat mysterious; calm down, focused on, forget about reality. At this place you can also be moved, sublimed and touched by presence of eternity, and share or express the fullness of life emotions. I present a musical analysis of sacred elements on the examples of works by contemporary Polish composers focused on the image of the suffering Mother of God under the cross of her son: Luctus Mariae by Pawel Lukaszewski from 2010 based on the Latin version of the Stabat Mater sequence, referring to the convention of the Italian madrigal theater from the 18th century and representing a severe beauty of the contemporary vision of meditation, and Stabat Mater by Ignacy Zalewski from 2018 making the suffering of the Mother of God more �real� basing on the contemporary version of a medieval sequence in a current experience of symbolic performative and vivid image that can be shared by the recipient.