Big Changes Planned for Volksbühne Theater in Berlin

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/16/theater/volksbhne-theater-berlin-new-season.html

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Chris Dercon, the new artistic director of the Volksbühne, a theater in Berlin, announced the 2017-18 season on Tuesday, the first under his leadership, and delivered on his promise to overhaul the theater’s programming.

The upcoming season, which will be staged at both the Volksbühne’s main building on Rosa-Luxembourg-Platz and at a hangar space in the city’s now defunct Tempelhof Airport, will begin in September with “Fous de Danse — All Berlin Dances at Tempelhof,” a series of dance pieces presented by the choreographer Boris Charmatz and the French conservatory Musée de la Danse. The Volksbühne will present a new adaptation of the “Iphigenia” myth, staged in Arabic, by the playwright Mohammad al-Attar and the director Omar Abusaada, and then will stage “Let Them Eat Chaos,” by the British spoken-word artist Kate Tempest.

In November, the Volksbühne will return to Rosa-Luxembourg-Platz, with an immersive performance, staged around the building, of works by the performance artist Tino Sehgal and the playwright Samuel Beckett. A trilogy of Beckett’s works, directed by his former collaborator Walter Asmus, will open there later in the month.

The slate of shows marks a thorough rethinking of the role that the Volksbühne, one of Berlin’s five major city-funded theater stages, will play in the city’s performing arts landscape. For the past 25 years, under the artistic director Frank Castorf, the theater has become a home for experimental German works created by Mr. Castorf and his frequent collaborators. Mr. Castorf has developed a distinctive aesthetic of lengthy, abstract theater productions that often employ video and dispense with traditional narrative forms.

Mr. Dercon’s plans for the theater — which mark a distinct shift toward interdisciplinary work and international artists — have garnered criticism since his appointment. A Belgian-born curator, he most recently ran the Tate Modern, where he helped oversee a major expansion into a new building. Mr. Dercon’s close ties to the market-driven British art world have raised eyebrows among those who see his background as a strange fit for a theater that relies largely on public funding and has a long, anti-establishment political tradition (in 2016 the Volksbühne received around 90 percent of its approximately €21 million budget — about $23 million — directly from the city).

Last summer, around 200 artists and technicians signed a letter objecting to Mr. Dercon’s plans to reimagine the theater, after he announced that he wanted to make it more interdisciplinary. In November, Berlin’s culture senator, Klaus Lederer, threatened to re-examine Mr. Dercon’s appointment, which was made by the city. In February, Mr. Lederer recanted, saying that the city had a contractual commitment to Mr. Dercon’s leadership.

In an interview ahead of the season announcement, Mr. Dercon said that his programming reflected an ever more outward-looking Berlin: “We are reflecting the fact that Berlin is becoming, and has become in recent years, a truly cosmopolitan city.”

Other productions in the new lineup include the theater director Susanne Kennedy’s “Women in Trouble”; the Thai film director Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s “Fever Room”; “Red Pieces,” a dance work by the Danish choreographer Mette Ingvartsen; the choreographer Jérôme Bel’s dance piece set to pop music, “The Show Must Go On”; and “What If Women Ruled the World,” a film and performance inspired by the movie “Dr. Strangelove” and created by the Israeli artist Yael Bartana along with Vicky Featherstone, who runs the Royal Court Theater in London.

Further programming will be announced at a later date, Mr. Dercon said, leaving the theater open to respond to current events as the season progresses.