All We Ever Wanted Was Everything

1987. Thatcher has been in power for eight years and Rick Astley promises he’s never going to never give us up.

1997. Seemingly overnight, Tony Blair turns the UK into a meritocracy and the Spice Girls recommend that we spice up our lives.

2007. The Great Global iPhone dictatorship begins and Britney has her breakdown.

2017. Nationalism rises all over the globe. The effects of climate change devastate whole tracts of land. The liberal bubble is pricked by Brexit, Trump, fake news and election meddling. Beyoncé is pop music’s only saving grace.

These last three decades are the backdrop for All We Ever Wanted Was Everything, which this year returned to the Fringe in the Roundabout theatre at Summerhall. But despite sweeping across this tumultuous time, Luke Barnes’ script for Middle Child’s production of this piece of gig theatre is not at all a melancholic affair. The story is a soulful rendering of the coming-of-age millennials Leah and Chris. Both grow up and live in Hull and their lives appears to be charted out at different ends of the aspirational spectrum. Chris is tortured by the big plans his widowed mum formulates for him while Leah’s gruff dad fails to give her any sense of how one could instil meaning into life. James Stayner’s Chris matures from an adorable boy who dreams big to a young man who has come to terms with the harsh reality of lad-culture masculinity. Bryony Davies’ Leah follows the dosh and forgets what it means to be kind. The path from grandiose childhood dreams to soul-crushing mediocracy is paved with bad nights out clubbing and interpersonal cruelty. The show puts the fate of these characters and with them the whole Earth, into the path of a lethal asteroid, personified ethereally by Alice Beaumont. It literally asks, “how can we survive this mess?”

A fresh, loud and pulsing soundtrack by James Frewer, sung and performed on live instruments by the actors, uses pop songs that echo the different eras in which the story unfolds. And these songs do so much more than simply allow audiences the joy of being able to ‘spot-the-cultural-reference’. They fuse spoken word and live gig forms into a new, rough and ready incarnation of musical theatre. Performer Marc Graham, the charismatic MC of the evening (think a young Lou Reed), sexy and confrontational, is at once supportive Earth spirit and judge of the characters’ journeys. Paul Smith’s direction has Graham in everyone’s face and he delicately walks the line between mischievous cupid and dangerous brawler.

2018. What a difference a year makes. In summer 2017, when the show premiered, smashing a world of broken promises and failed aspirations to smithereens seemed like the only viable option. It took the then communal sense of “We’re all doomed!” to literal extremes. A year later, walking past the “covfefe?” coffee shop booth on Edinburgh’s Bristo Square, the show serves as a reminder of how angry and urgent the situation felt just a year ago – and it’s somewhat shocking that within that short period that red-hot anger and confusion seems to have turned into some kind of hazy memory. The shared sense of doom has not been squashed, it has instead become normality. Between echoes of D-Ream and Celine Dion the piece is a thoroughly current, and surprisingly poignant rallying cry for more compassion and love as the antidote against the coarsening of society.

People Show 130: The Last Straw

Agreed-upon conventions make communication possible. In the 1950s J.L. Austin famously explained how language is actually “performative”, that is, by saying certain things we are not just shaping streams of air flowing through our lungs, throat and mouth into sounds, we are actually physically shaping the world. Words, to put it succinctly, do. Which is why it’s important to use them correctly. 

Here’s a test:

1. Define the term ‘catastrophe’.

2. Name the correct term for intentional misinformation.

3. How do you pronounce the word ’tapenade’? 

Write down your answers. 

Meaning is created based on how language has been used in the past and violations of these established rules are normally penalised by exclusion from the kinds of agreement and expectations that words can constitute. But in the last couple of years, something has fundamentally changed about the social contract based on language. Before we continue, let’s check how you did in the quiz. 

 ˙puǝᴉɹɟ ǝsolɔ ɐ ǝɹ’ʎǝɥʇ ɟᴉ uǝʌǝ ‘sǝʌlǝsɯǝɥʇ ɟo pǝɯɐɥsɐ ǝq plnoɥs puɐ ƃuoɹʍ sᴉǝsᴉʍɹǝɥʇo sʞuᴉɥʇ oɥʍ ǝuoʎɹǝʌǝ puɐ ǝpɐuoɯǝl ǝʞᴉl ʇou ˙III ˙sʍǝu ǝʞɐɟ sᴉ ǝslǝ ƃuᴉɥʇʎɹǝʌǝ ‘ɐpuɐƃɐdoɹd ˙II ˙uᴉɐɹʇ ɹnoʎ ɹoɟ ʇᴉɐʍ oʇ ǝʌɐɥ noʎ sǝʞɐɯ ʇuǝʌǝ ǝɥʇ ƃuol ʍoɥ uo ʎlǝɹᴉʇuǝ spuǝdǝp ʇᴉ puɐ uoᴉʇᴉuᴉɟǝp ǝuo ou sᴉ ǝɹǝɥʇ ˙I :suoᴉʇnloS ʇɔǝɹɹoƆ 

So, what was your score? You’re only allowed an opinion on matters of public debate if you got all three answers correct. Sorry about that.

Experimental theatre group’s People Show have been responding to five decades of the world doing strange things with words. Their show 130: The Last Straw, currently on in a tiny former lecture theatre at Edinburgh’s Summerhall, looks at the erosion of what can be counted on as reliable when humans have been talking about the world in the recent past. Fiona Creese and Gareth Brierly, the two players, can be seen in a series of ten or so fluidly transitioning scenes in which communication fails, is malignantly manipulated or simply betrays the people engaged in it. Exaggerations when describing a street scene turn from hellish images and “Rivers of Blood” to a negligible non-event. Have we all forgotten to know what it is like to see and hear something that is real?

The deliberate lack of narrative cohesion in the way the show has been devised illustrates the way in which tempering with promises, facts and truth appears to remain utterly without consequence for many people currently in charge of public discourse. After sharing hideous atrocities or claiming that they love while almost choking one another the two players can still go on to merrily talk about interior design.

It is a strange show, absurdly comedic in some places, highly metaphoric in others, and more like an intellectual performance art exercise. Watching this is, at times, hard work and mainly because the short scenes precisely refuse to play out to any ultimate consequence. Yet, when Brierly’s body spasms on the floor of Jessica Worrall’s very topical paper-shredded design we can recognise how bodies are very much impacted by the atrocities caused by the utterance of words.

Nocturne, Albany

Becoming-fox, a quick manual:
– Keep close to the walls
– Practice your sweet, sweet love-making sounds only after dusk
– Stare the fuckers down

The full moon shines on Deptford town square. It smells of piss and one of the two guys in the corner is chewing down on a shawarma. In front of the community library a retro-vibe installation themed around the human relationship with animals draws in curious onlookers. Abandoned snake skin, various bottles with liquids and trinkets, a dead hare, a TV set plays an episode of Flipper on VHS. A taxidermy fox on its hind legs smiles at me reassuringly and offers a plate of freshly polished apples. Some bunched up flags in the centre of the table signal that I’m about to be confronted with a global issue. As it turns out, shawarma guy and I are going to spend the evening as part of the same group in Andy Field’s new show at the LIFT festival. Realised in collaboration with the Latvian artist Krista Burāne, Nocturne is a promenade piece quite literally – a series of silent walks exploring the area of Deptford and listening in on the sounds of the city, or what the theatre makers call a ‘night song’.

I’ve spent nights in Deptford before and the songs I heard then were neither melodious nor particularly connected to the natural world. I’ve also worked in the local Albany theatre and community buildings. A few years ago foxes, during their nightly excursions, had stolen chickens that the staff had lovingly baptised with names like Chickney Spears. I was ready to listen to what these night-time tricksters might be willing to tell me in their defence. As such, the idea of exploring this alternative night life of the local animals immediately appealed to me.

Before the show starts and we go into the library the audience is divided into small groups. Andy Field asks our group whether we knew to what animal the strange skull with the massive yellow teeth on the far side of the table might have once belonged. I say “Beaver?” Andy nods and I feel like I’ve already proved myself as an ecologically aware human. Shawarma guy looks like he couldn’t care less. Inside we are handed over to a performer who will be leading us on our walks. And soon after we’re off, hanging onto a rope attached to our guide’s belt, making our way across busy streets, past silent church yards, through railway arches and grassy inner-city green lands.

Deptford can be a loud, colourful and messy place but it has recently undergone some significant changes. The speed of the area’s gentrification is breath-taking. The artificial lights from the newly developed high rises reflect in the old Deptford creek and illuminate some ducks. Then on a later walk, a gaggle of geese congregating in the river bed. On our first walk we too are a flock, arranged in a kind of loop behind our guide who is a small, soft-spoken woman with a gentle face. She tries to tune us into the bird song. Animal noises are mixed into the shouts and laughter from the lively housing estate through which we pass and when our guide spots them she walks more slowly and urges us to notice and drink them in. To be honest though, I doubt that shawarma guy’s friend is getting it – he only has a non-committed single finger hooked over the rope that connects us all.

Matt Trueman describes the show as “partly a crash course for flaneurs, disrupting the way we navigate urban space,” saying “it’s mostly a reminder that the city is shared”.  While I agree that a different way relating to the space and its temporalities emerges, I think that the piece angles towards shifting something a lot more fundamental than the human relationship with space. Rather than being a strolling explorer of our city, the piece probes whether the looping of experience (we do the same walk three times) and fabricating artificial moments of stillness can allow us to tune us into non-human frequencies. It asks whether in some incremental way we can shift something within us. Can theatrical forms facilitate the practice of becoming-animal, or at the very least help us to hear their voices more clearly among the noise of the city?

In the way it tries to explore new relations between humans and animals, Nocturne struggles on a few accounts. In between the walks, there are small interludes working with vocals and material objects that at times feature some surprisingly heavy-handed eco-critical symbolisms. This is easily forgivable, because, at least in my book, the piece has the right politics.

More problematically then, the performance tries little to involve the audience’s own physicality (apart, perhaps, from one-finger guy who keeps treading on my heels). While there is some experimentation with different movement types (such as when we as a group are moved around a little bit like foxes ourselves) the input from the guide during the walks is kept to an absolute minimum. And being on a silent walk means that the mind necessarily wanders. When we see our first fox (one of many that night) I am indeed thrilled, but I also can’t quite get over how the team must have dramaturgically engineered this encounter. The walks are long, stretching out over the whole evening, and towards the end of the second walk my back aches. Little mundane thoughts creep up on me, for example, I keep thinking that it is a shame I left my phone in my bag – by now I would have easily made up my daily step count. Instead of a new embodied experience I am just a little bit beside myself.

Another issue weighs a little heavier. When it shifts its focus away from auditory sensations (by channelling animal sounds through the human vocal chords of the performers into a stunning cacophony), Nocturne becomes quite dependent on the scopic regimes of humans – how we watch and how we are being watched by others. Not only do we look at and compare the changes in ‘natural’ and human habitat throughout the evening, we are also being noticeably looked at by the local residents. If it tries to tune our sensibilities into the non-human life forms, it somewhat lacks a sensitive ear for how the local human residents might perceive this artistic intrusion. Several times people come up and want to know what it is these strange groups of people are doing when prowling their neighbourhood. The answers and interactions in these moments are somewhat dissatisfying and leave a bad taste about how the piece is disconnected from the local land on which it stakes out its eco-critical argument. If set in an area that is being rapidly transformed by capital investment, art must be woke about how itself contributes to the sense of alienation that local residents might feel about that change.

On my solitary walk back to the train station I feel more unsafe than in my pack of pretend-animals; I am a human woman out late at night in London after all. The only sounds I hear are from my headphones feeding a podcast into my ears as reassurance. It is then that one of the foxes and I meet again. I lock eyes with it for a long time and, of course, I still can’t make out what it is trying to tell me. Maybe it just wants me to go away. And so, I do.

Originally written for Exeunt.

How did Berlin’s Volksbühne end up in a state of crisis?

Brought in to shake up one of the German capital’s iconic theatres, Chris Dercon aimed to expand its remit and embrace a wider range of art forms. Following his abrupt resignation, Annegret Märten examines for The Stage why his agenda proved unpopular with artists and local residents.

 

Rapid change at the top of Berlin’s prestigious Volksbühne theatre has gripped and puzzled the German nation. Belgian curator Chris Dercon, who only recently took over from long-time artistic director Frank Castorf, has been forced to resign from his post after only seven months, leaving one of Germany’s most influential stages without creative leadership. The list of whom to blame is embarrassingly long.

Between 1992 and 2017, Castorf and his associates had used the publicly funded building to explore experimental forms of politically charged theatre and redefined what was considered permissible on stage. Finding someone capable of grappling with its cult following and iconic legacy was always going to be challenging. Enter Dercon.

Between 2011 and 2016, Dercon headed the Tate Modern in London, significantly increasing visitor numbers for the gallery. The decision to replace Castorf with Dercon was not popular with regular Volksbühne audiences, staff or ensemble personnel – and especially the Berlin public. Yet the quick resignation was a surprise to even his harshest critics. The reasons for the officially mutually agreed departure are deeply embedded in Berlin politics.

Back in 2015, Castorf had hoped to extend his contract but the then culture senator, social democrat Tim Renner, had other plans. Renner, a former music producer and chairman of Universal Music Germany, had long advocated for what has become known as the ‘Kreativpakt’, an agreement between players within politics, economy and the culture sector for the delivery of a substantial overhaul of working conditions within the German creative industries.

As Berlin’s culture senator, Renner’s vision for the city’s creative sector was for it to play a substantial factor in shaping city development. It seems the Volksbühne was part of this ambition. After two and a half years of negotiation to shift the Volksbühne’s structure and financial investment into new spaces, Renner announced Dercon as Castorf’s successor.

Key to the new directorship would be the development of a theatre representing different art forms, moving away from the established spoken-word format, and the development of Tempelhof, a former airfield in the city centre, into a venue with a capacity of 20,000.

What changed between Renner’s vision of reinvigorating Berlin by remoulding the Volksbühne and Dercon’s premature departure? The short answer is a local election. The long answer: an unsightly public witch-hunt against Dercon in the press and public forums, an occupation of the Volksbühne building, the airport venue proving an unaffordable pipe dream and disappointing audience numbers.

Fuelled by politicians in the run-up to the local senate elections, the threat to the theatre’s ensemble structure gave particular cause for anxiety. An open letter from staff, actors and well-known associated artists expressed concern about the long-established repertoire-theatre model. They believed it was threatened by a curated, festival-like event model, inviting more productions from free groups into the house than it produced. In addition, the relentless personal attacks on Dercon in the German press looked absurdly out of place in a climate of usually temperate cultural discourse.

Dercon and his programme director Marietta Piekenbrock never managed to communicate the merit of their vision for the stage as a laboratory for new formats, in which different art forms could meet and enrich one another. Before Dercon could start working on his first season, attempts to engage with existing audiences were blocked from various sides.

A sustained effort to win over long-term Castorf associate René Pollesch ultimately failed. Pollesch declined invitations for fear of having his artistic freedom stifled under a more controlling artistic leadership. Then an artist-led intervention calling itself Dust to Glitter occupied the Volksbühne just as Dercon and his team were officially due to move in. The protesters were eventually removed by the police.

When the season finally commenced and audience numbers were consistently low, post-election culture senator Klaus Lederer, of socialist party Die Linke, was quick to dispense with Dercon. With Dercon’s departure, the opportunity was lost to overturn some of the patriarchal production structures that had moved into the Volksbühne with Castorf in the 1990s and remain prevalent nationwide.

Dercon’s programme envisioned the theatre as a democratic meeting space, reflecting the changing population of the city, but this was not a change demanded by the population itself. It was thrust upon them through political intervention and resented.

The outgoing artist director, who will still be paid until the end of the season, was not available for comment. However, at the end of April, Dercon gave his view of proceedings at a public event to discuss the systemic crises in European theatre at London’s Goethe-Institut, an organisation that champions German culture abroad.

His highly anticipated first public appearance after the sacking served as reassurance that he would be welcomed back in the UK. “I’m looking for a job!” he joked, before adding, more seriously: “There was never a plan B.”

This wholehearted commitment to his Volksbühne vision makes dealing with the issue particularly delicate.

At the event, Dercon shrewdly analysed the ideological function of the Volksbühne as a projection surface for an idea of Berlin that many currently see threatened.

“Castorf created a mirror,” he said. But, he continued: “Castorf was never nostalgic about the German Democratic Republic. The public, the hipsters and the nipsters, they projected much more of this image on the Volksbühne.”

Citing the increasing internationalisation of the city, Dercon strongly dismissed this nostalgia: “The promises made by Berlin since 1991/92, the promises Berlin made for itself – that Berlin is over. Berlin is becoming a normal city with normal issues. Why should we be hypocritical about it?”

It is unclear who Dercon means by “we”, as he had himself recently moved to Berlin. But his brand of future-facing optimism was not shared by the locals in a city that visibly wears and sometimes consciously picks at the scars of its turbulent history.

The overheated debates seem to relate directly to the cognitive dissonances in Dercon’s argument about communities. He seems at once aware of theatre’s importance for social cohesion while simultaneously disregarding the existing community structures that the Volksbühne space had fostered. A further problem is his contention that theatre work should support transformative progress within a redeveloping city rather than continue to examine those forces that hope to keep the city’s gentrification at bay.

The Volksbühne was caught in the perfect storm of inconsistent political financial planning, a failure to communicate the new programme and perhaps the nostalgic refusal to accept the reality of modern Berlin. These events demonstrate that cultural spaces have a duty to join the conversation about how society is being transformed. In particular, theatre needs to engage with the question of how it shapes a city. In the UK, when new theatres pop up or when spaces are refurbished, the gentrifying impact of these changes requires critical reflection.

Dercon’s failure in Berlin is likely to discourage those in German theatre who hope to break up old structures that many see as hopelessly hierarchical and financially difficult to sustain. One such reformer, Matthias Lilienthal, is leaving his post at Munich’s Kammerspiele in 2020, after only five years. Already, several names for Dercon’s successor are being floated and the protestors who occupied the building are organising a demonstration during the city’s big theatre festival, Theatertreffen. The debate around the future of the Volksbühne is far from over.

 

Profile: Volksbühne Berlin

Interim director: Klaus Dorr
Managing director: Thomas Walter
Programme director: Marietta Piekenbrock
Founded: 1914
Theatre spaces:
• Volksbühne Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz: Grosser Saal (824 seats); Roter Salon (200 seats); Gruner Salon (200 seats); 3 Stock (60 seats)
• Volksbühne Tempelhof: Capacity up to 20,000 (future uncertain)
• Volksbühne Fullscreen
Number of productions:
• New (2017): 20
• Repertoire (2017): 55
• Co-productions: 0 (2017); 8 (2018, planned)
• Additional events: 10
Audience figures (2016): 167,901
Staff: 227.5 permanent, plus six apprentices
Turnover (2016): €18.5 million (£16.3 million) public funding from the federal state of Berlin; €3 million (£2.6 million) received in ticket sales, donations and other income
Key contact: Johannes Ehmann, head of press; johannes.ehmann@volksbuehne-berlin.de
Website: volksbuehne.berlin

5 things you need to know about the Volksbühne

1. Throughout the years, key German theatre makers such as Max Reinhardt, Benno Besson, Heiner Muller and Christoph Schlingensief worked at the Volksbuhne.

2. When founded in 1914, the theatre was designed to provide theatre for the working-class masses. The initial slogan above its door was ‘Kunst dem Volke’, meaning ‘art for the people’.

3. In the 1920s, during the Weimar Republic, director Erwin Piscator established the Volksbuhne as a hotbed for experimental practice.

4. During the Second World War, the theatre was heavily damaged in the bombing of Berlin.

5. Before the fall of the Berlin Wall and during the protests of 1989, the Volksbühne was an important space in which dissidents, artists and student protesters came together.

Image Credit: David Baltzer