Professions and Education

When in 2007 Helgard Haug and Daniel Wetzel of the artists’ collective Rimini Protokoll won the Mülheim Dramatist Prize for their documentary theatre project Karl Marx: Das Kapital, the result was a small scandal.



Quite understandably, on the one hand, since the prize is expressly given for dramatic texts that could, at least potentially, serve as the basis for productions by various directors and companies. But what was aesthetically compelling about the text that Rimini Protokoll developed together with selected “experts” on Capital was coupled with its performance by just those real people whom Helgard Haug and Daniel Wetzel had interviewed in the course of their research on Marx’s main work. Unless the Marx scholar Thomas Kuzcynski is personally standing on stage, as Rimini Protokoll planned it, the documentary conception of the artists' team makes no sense.

On the other hand, the scandal says a good deal about the conventions prevailing in German-language municipal theatre: when a play is a play has been fairly precisely defined up to now not only in Mülheim. In general, theatre is understood to be the performance of a dramatic text by trained actors who can recite their lines well and are guided by directors responsible for breathing contemporary life into canonical works. That is to say, the hierarchy and division of labour that predominates in the institution of the municipal theatre affects its possible aesthetics. The Mülheim Prize jury recognised quite clearly the signs of the time when it selected a team that deliberately breaks with these conventions and yet is successful in the exclusive sphere of high culture: in 2007 Rimini Protokoll also pocketed the Faust Special Award, and in 2008 it will receive both the European Theatre Prize and the Hörspielpreis der Kriegsblinden, the most important award for radio plays.

Different from acting schools and universities

That the unwritten laws and dogmas which shape German-language theatre, in spite of all its diversity, are repeatedly dissolved and recomposed has to do with an already legendary theatre school in the Hessian provinces. It was at the Institute for Applied Theatre Studies at the University of Gießen that, for example, Helgard Haug, Stefan Kaegi and Daniel Wetzel of Rimini Protokoll learned how to break the rules and think about theatre in a completely different way. Acting schools and courses of study in stage directing train students for the municipal theatres; university drama departments teach theory and history, but provide only marginal practical training. The Gießen Institute, by contrast, most resembles an art academy. It trains qualified scholars, theatre makers and thinkers, and confirms them in the attempt to re-think theatre from the bottom up and find their own artistic position through experimentation.

Gob Squad

Accordingly, Gießen graduates may be found bustling about in the most diverse areas of the theatre world: as directors (Hans-Werner Kroesinger, Rimini Protokoll, Hofmann & Lindholm, Helena Waldmann, Auftrag: Lorey, and others), authors (René Pollesch, Tim Staffel, Jens Roselt, Moritz Rinke, and others), performance groups (Gob Squad, She She Pop, Showcase Beat Le Mot, Monster Truck), scholars (Annemarie Matzke, Gerald Siegmund, and others), and dramaturges (Florian Malzacher, Winfried Tobias, Bettina Masuch, and others).

History

Robert Wilson

The Institute for Applied Theatre Studies was founded twenty-five years ago by the Polish scholar and Brecht expert Andrzej Wirth, who had previously taught for many years in the United States. Wirth brought three things with him to Gießen: an elitist avant-garde mission, the conviction that a black box rehearsal stage for the practical testing of theoretical ideas is indispensable, and a wide international network, from which the students soon profited. Heiner Müller rehearsed with them his Hamletmachine, Robert Wilson, John Jesurun and George Tabori gave seminars. After Wirth’s retirement in 1992, his academic colleagues and successors continued to bring interesting artists and journalists to Gießen as Guest Professors, including choreographers such as Jérôme Bel, Xavier Le Roy and currently Deufert + Plischke, media artists such as Rabih Mroué, actors such as Viviane de Muyn, the popular culture theorist Diedrich Diederichsen, and the composer Heiner Goebbels, who has headed the Institute since 2003. They left behind their glamour, scent marks, and simply their “cool theatrical savvy”. Another word for this special Gießen know-how might be “post-dramatic theatre”, a term coined by Hans-Thies Lehmann, the theatre scholar and long-time colleague of Wirth, in his eponymous standard work on the art of theatre.

Reducing the means extends the possibilities

The Malady of Death

Gießen students can neither work with professional actors nor make use of a completely equipped stage, even if the black box remains at the centre of their studies. Those who know Gießen explain the development of artistic possibilities there by precisely such lacks: for example, what is called the “documentary” use of everyday life and reality as an artistic resource, often in the form of theatrical ready-mades. The director Hans-Werner Kroesinger works up in this way historical and political events, Rimini Protokoll approaches the most diverse cultural phenomena through interviewing and putting their “experts on everyday life” on the stage, and the director duos Hofmann & Lindholm and Auftrag: Lorey often make interview material the basis of their performances.

Another possibility was that the students made themselves the subject and went on stage as performers. In the mid-nineties, inspired by the British Life Art, they founded several performance groups still in existence today: the feminist women’s group She She Pop, the “boy group” Showcase Beat Le Mot, whose children’s theatre performance of The Robber Hotzenplotz surprised grown-ups too and won the Goethe Institute Prize at the Impulse Festival 2007, and the Anglo-German group Gob Squad, which has become ever more masterly in the interlacing of video art and participatory theatre.

That theoretical input can have quite concrete artistic results may also be seen perhaps most impressively in the text-theatre of René Pollesch, which especially brings post-modern discourse about the constitution of the subject under capitalism to the stage in linguistic form.

Naturally, talented people have also emerged from other programmes and theatre schools, and theatre is repeatedly being re-invented against all routine even in the municipal theatre. Yet measured by its roughly 22 students, annually selected by a procedure that requires an entrance examination and presentation of a portfolio, Gießen appears to have an unusually high quota of success. Actually, what is surprising is that Gießen has not yet become a model for other theatre schools.