MUNICH — Essentially the most instantly hanging side of this 12 months’s Theatertreffen, the annual showcase of the perfect of German-language theater, is the numbers.
To make their choice, the 2020 competition jury watched 285 productions in 60 cities throughout Germany, Austria and Switzerland. The ensuing program, which runs till Monday, is dauntingly full, with 80 hours of streaming occasions on a digital competition platform.
When the seven jurors introduced their choice in February, the competition hoped to carry in-person performances. However a 3rd wave of the coronavirus, which has gripped Germany in current months, meant that for the second 12 months in a row, Theatertreffen was confined to this on-line presentation.
Because the begin of the pandemic, German playhouses have been uniquely proactive in adapting to social distancing restrictions. Many have devised new theatrical codecs, together with immersive dwell productions for solo spectators or digital-only productions which have enlisted social media, video messaging apps, chat rooms and video gaming expertise to create artwork that responds to our circumstances.
Maintaining with this artistic proliferation has been often exhausting; extra constantly, it has been inspiring to see how theater right here — a lot of which receives sturdy state funding — has refused to lie down and die.
I had hoped that this 12 months’s Theatertreffen would take the complete measure of this difficult 12 months, so I used to be dismayed that the jury selected just one “corona present” among the many 10 productions chosen for the competition.
However what a manufacturing it was!
“Present Me a Good Time” by the German-British theater collective Gob Squad, was a wild noon-to-midnight efficiency that whizzed between the empty stage of the Berliner Festspiele and varied members within the exterior world, discussing life throughout the pandemic, conducting man-on-the-street interviews about theater and soliciting creative ideas from callers. The performers on the theater, driving by Berlin and traipsing round England have been related through headsets and cameras in what typically had the side of a theatrical telethon.
But regardless of the marathon operating time, it was accessible and right down to earth. By design, it was a present that one may dip into and out of at will; over the 12 hours, greater than 3,000 individuals popped their digital heads in.
Whereas meditating on life, theater and the intersection of the 2, the performers routinely injected their largely ad-libbed performances (in German and English) with beneficiant doses of humor and silliness. One instance: For 2 minutes every hour, they dropped the whole lot and screeched with laughter.
Whereas not one of the different productions supplied an identical diploma of significant reflection on life throughout Covid-19, the truth of the pandemic clearly influenced the aesthetic decisions behind a number of of the opposite streamed productions.
Theaters had already reopened, at restricted capability, in Switzerland when a livestream of Schauspielhaus Zurich’s “It’s Solely the Finish of the World” opened Theatertreffen final week. However the director, Christopher Rüping, an everyday on the competition who has been a outstanding proponent of recent digital prospects for theater throughout the pandemic, determined to maintain the dwell viewers out. As an alternative of performing for a handful of spectators, the actors addressed cameras. The outcome, watched on-line, was a hybrid theatrical expertise harking back to cinéma vérité.
Roving hand-held cameras captured Jean-Luc Lagarce’s 1990 play a couple of homosexual man who returns to his estranged household after a protracted absence. Most spectacular was how efficient the livestream’s filming fashion was at capturing the nuances of the manufacturing’s wonderful actors, together with Ulrike Krumbiegel because the nervous, damaged matriarch and Wiebke Mollenhauer and Nils Kahnwald as a pair of emotionally scarred siblings.
This was additionally the second 12 months that Theatertreffen’s jury voted to undertake a quota system to make sure that at the very least half the productions could be directed by girls or majority-female collectives. (A current research by the European Theater Conference that surveyed 22 international locations discovered that there are six males for each 4 girls working in theater.)
By far probably the most didactic was “NAME HER. In Search of Ladies+,” a 7½-hour multimedia performance-lecture, directed by Marie Schleef, about missed girls all through historical past. Standing in entrance of a triptych of enormous iPhone-like shows of biographical info, charts and movies, the actress Anne Tismer gave an interesting efficiency that, nevertheless heroic, did endure on video. Watching her rattle off this A to Z of good and unjustly ignored girls, it was laborious to not think about it might have had a wholly completely different immediacy and power if skilled dwell.
One of the crucial outstanding feminine theatermakers in Germany, and a frequent presence at Theatertreffen, is Karin Beier, who leads the Deutsches Schauspielhaus in Hamburg. This 12 months, her manufacturing of Rainald Goetz’s “Empire of Loss of life” served up a savage indictment of America’s post-9/11 navy adventures overseas and democratic degeneracy at house, and it was simply the grimmest factor on the competition. I couldn’t watch for the four-hour theatrical scream to finish.
After so many prolonged exhibits, I used to be additionally grateful for those who clocked in at little greater than an hour. They supplied a way of intimacy that was lacking from the extra sprawling productions.
One was Leonie Böhm’s inside monologue model of “Medea*,” Schauspielhaus Zurich’s second manufacturing on the competition, which labored greatest as a finely tuned psychological examination of one in all world literature’s most well-known villainesses. In it, the actress Maja Beckmann’s Medea struggles with how Euripides’ tragedy fates her to be a baby assassin, and the way historical past will ceaselessly choose her a monster.
Staged in a big white tent, “Medea*” created an environment of privateness that it shared with the competition’s most uncommon entry, the delicate dance efficiency “Scores That Formed Our Friendship,” a bodily tender exploration of the friendship between Lucy Wilke, a performer with spinal muscular atrophy, and Pawel Dudus, a queer Polish artist and dancer.
Regardless of the quota system, this 12 months’s Theatertreffen featured just one typical play by a feminine playwright that was additionally directed by a lady: Anna Gmeyner’s “Automatenbüfett.”
Now we have the Burgtheater in Vienna and the director Barbara Frey to thank for the rediscovery of this 1932 play by the Austrian-Jewish Gmeyner. In it, she combines folks realism with symbolic components for a parable-like story of the frequent good undermined by avarice and sexual dependency, set largely in a vending-machine restaurant. The automat dominates the drab set of Frey’s dramatically incisive and impeccably acted manufacturing.
It’s far and away probably the most conventional manufacturing on this Theatertreffen, in addition to top-of-the-line. Beginning late this month, it’ll once more be seen onstage in Vienna, the place theaters have simply reopened after half a 12 months of hibernation.