Theatre Scene and Trends

Migrants on stage and in the audience, and plays with subjects relating to migrants on the stage – the German theatre has discovered a new theme. Well-intentioned documentary theatre? That was yesterday.












In Stuttgart, stage director Volker Lösch takes youths with Turkish roots from the street, puts them on the stage of the Schauspielhaus and lets them act out their pent-up anger at their foreign home country in Wut (i.e. Anger). In the theatre in Essen twenty young people from a city district where most of the inhabitants are migrants tell their stories in the Homestories project, stories that have nothing to do with peaceful multicultural everyday life. In the Kulturfabrik Kampnagel in Hamburg, innovative young musicians and dancers, all of them the children of immigrants, create the glittery world of a show to counter the brutal and disillusioning reality. And in Berlin and Cologne, too, in Munich and Düsseldorf, it is evident not only in the theatre foyer but also on stage that Germany is an immigration country. Migration, previously a subject in the social statistics and in reports on problems in urban “flashpoint districts" has made it onto the theatre programmes.

The theatres have recognised migration, which lies anything but far from their doors, as a theme. And they react as only theatres can – quickly, provocatively and imaginatively. Quite differently from the way in which authorities and experts deal with the situation of immigrants. German playhouses and fringe-theatres have long since left behind them the always well-intentioned and social work type of pure documentary theatre. Here, it is mainly young people with Turkish roots who, between more or less spectacular hip-hop interludes, talk in their own patois of homelessness and joblessness, cultural shifts, of violence and of their longings.

No longer foreign in a foreign land

The actors appearing on the stage are still usually amateur – all too often, such stuff as broken dreams are made on. However, what is performed on stage is no longer a one-to-one copy of reality. At the Arkadas Theater in Cologne, for example, young Muslims were able to express their interests and concerns in German reality through classical roles such as Othello, Romeo or Juliet – the times when “the foreigner was foreign” regardless of whether he lived abroad or in one’s own country, have changed little. Meanwhile, there are well-known writers such as Anja Hilling, Moritz Rinke and Feridun Zaimoglu who deal with migration in their plays.

But of course, theatre can no longer get by without a theoretical basis and without events, even when dealing with the subject of migration, and it stages migration as a Gesamtkunstwerk. For a long time it has no longer been enough to hope that an audience that normally does not find its way into the theatre will be attracted simply because a relevant play is being performed. Thus, the Munich Kammerspiele gave the entire 2008 season the ambiguous motto “Open to all and sundry”. The perspectives could hardly have been more diverse: Ödipus auf Kolonos was a traditional staging of flight, rejection and integration, Doing Identity – Bastard Munich took theatre projects out onto the street and into the conurbations, specifically approaching the target group. And in cooperation with the University of Munich and the Goethe Institut, there were cultural dialogues on questions of migration and integration in Europe entitled “No integration?!”

With all this variety, it is not uncommon for theatre to be right on the boundary between high-brow entertainment and social institution. Someone who knows his way around equally well in both these areas is Volker Lösch, who works with Turkish amateur actors in Stuttgart. Is he a social worker or a theatre maker? At any rate, Lösch describes very precisely what is important to him when he uses art when he believes that politics has failed: “These young people are third-generation guest workers. And it has to be said that there has been no real integration. They live between the cultures, oscillating between two languages and referring to themselves by the derogatory word Kanaken in order to highlight the difference. And they have a very clear idea of what it is that divides them from the German setting. Basically, their main problem is the growing gap between rich and poor. For a wide variety of social and family reasons, these young people do not have the educational opportunities that promise well-paid jobs. And they are being forced into a system that is collapsing right now”.

Visualised wishes and dreams

Admittedly, when these young people articulate their justified anger, they should not get stuck in stereotypical reproaches of the system. In the theatre, after all, there are enough ways of offering alternatives to ordinary everyday life, even if they are “only” visualised wishes and dreams, as Lösch puts it.

Aslı Sevindim, a journalist with Turkish roots, is on the organising committee of the European capital of culture “Ruhr.2010“ and is responsible for the “festival of immigrant cultures“ part of the programme. For her, it is quite clear what art, including theatre, can contribute to the theme of migration: “If we really want to bring about change through culture (...), it cannot just happen through ballet in tutus, but through culture taking place on the street and en masse. By taking culture out of the temples, migrants could also make a measurable contribution to culture in Germany. They could change everyday culture in Germany just as they have already changed food culture.” Or to put it another way: why not go out for a drama rather than a doner kebab now and again ...?