In 2001 she staged the premiere of Gesine Danckwart’s “Daily Bread” and made the play about panicking job hamsters on the wheel of the new economy into a cryptic game. She had five actors on Hawaiian palm wallpaper play that children’s game where everyone can move forwards so long as no one sees them move forwards. Anyone who is caught has to return to the start. Since it all takes place in a shallow water tank, the premiere became a moving picture in the “shark tank of the labour market”.
One year later, she produced Roland Schimmelpfennig’s “Push Up” in Dresden’s Theater in der Fabrik. Schimmelpfennig’s play deals with individuals in high positions who mainly like to bully. Pohle put the action in an enclosed rectangle with simple conference tables. The six push-ups were scattered throughout the audience, waiting for their action inside the rectangle and entered into dialogue arguments. Christiane Pohle used individual members of her independent theatre group LABORLAVACHE founded in Hamburg in 1999, to which she also remained loyal when she was suddenly courted by major theatres in the German-speaking world.
Pohle travels on two tracks, producing either with members of the ensemble of the theatre concerned or with actors from the independent scene and continues to work on the jointly developed language of movement. She is actively in favour of cooperation between independent and municipal theatre: “When I immerse myself in a major theatre like a satellite for eight weeks, I am in demand like a soloist with my individual view and interpretation of a play and can develop a directorial style as an individual. But a style of this kind is interesting me less and less, what I am interested in is the style of a project or play that is developed by everyone together and is thus irrevocably associated with the subject being dealt with.”
At the start of the 2002 season, she adapted the novel “Borderliners” by the Danish writer Peter Hoeg for the stage and produced dance theatre. In the novel, Hoeg allows three teenagers to experience tortuous days in a welfare state dictatorial educational institute. In Pohle’s stage adaptation, spiritual exercises of movement underlaid with speech could be seen that made it clear how educational torture works. Pohle’s love of sets that challenge actors was very noticeable. The play was acted in front of and on plastic tracks that were raised in the background and against which the actors kept on diving, and which they kept bumping into and sliding down.
One year later, in the Swiss premiere of Falk Richter’s “Electronic City” she also produced the play on an uneven surface and returned to the subject of the globalised labour market. In Richter’s text surface Tom and Joy suffer from the alienation of the working conditions they have chosen for themselves. Joy is a checkout girl at airports while Tom, as a global player, never precisely knows which airport he is currently in. They cannot find each other and Christiane Pohle shows them as jet-set individuals who suddenly discover their desire for local homeliness. Tom and Joy sit on barstools in triplicate like lonely isolated people of the new economy and are furiously trying to keep their position.
“On the side” Christiane Pohle is the singer in the Berlin band “ganz schöne geräuschkulisse” and within a short time she has developed into a producing global player in the German-speaking world. In summer 2004 she will stage Joanna Laurens’s “Five Gold Rings”, a co-production of the Salzburg Festival and the Munich Kammerspiele.
At the same time, she was preparing the independent project “Regard My Soul”, which had its premiere at the sophiensäle in Berlin in March 2005 and in which she transformed a macabre, deadly dream of quick money into an “airily light evening” (“Süddeutsche Zeitung”) – it was inspired by the authentic case of a South Tyrolean man who had his leg amputated with a chainsaw in order to gain an invalidity pension and bled to death before he could be reached by a doctor.
Christiane Pohle has continued to work mainly at the Munich Kammerspiele and the Vienna Burgtheater, where she directed the world premiere of Gert Jonke’s “The Submerged Cathedral” in 2005, transforming Jonke’s lyrical text into captivatingly powerful images. Pohle’s production of the play was invited to the Mülheim Theatertage in 2006. At the beginning of the 2006/2007 season, she directed an adaptation of Thomas Bernhard’s novel “Extinction” at the Thalia Theater in Hamburg. This was followed towards the end of the season by the world premiere of the project “Parsifal in the City” at the Munich Kammerspiele.
