An Abuse in the Theatre: some notes

In 2018 I was contracted by one of the larger houses in Germany working under a famous director. We were working with children in the cast, and, as part of the assisting staff for that show, sometimes we had to put on knee pads and walk around on our knees in the rehearsal room, pretending to be children for the lead actor during rehearsals while they were all at school. It's one of those weird, absurd things you only get to do in theatre - those type of surreal sitautions that are why we love the stage.

I was sitting off-stage watching my colleague strap on her kneepads, dwarfed by the bulky frame of the actor, surrounded by about 20 workers of the house: experienced stage designers, composers, and musical directors, of various genders. It was early in the process, and they had all gathered to check out rehearsals, meet each other, and chat about the work of their various departments. As they prepared for the next scene, with my colleague approximately waist-high to the actor, The Director offhandedly said:

"Brett, ready? Ok, let's go. Is Annika down ready to do what she does best? Ok, music, and let's go!"*

At the comment "ready to do what she does best", there was some nervous laughter from the surrounding workers of the show. I watched them closely. Had they just heard what I heard? Had I even heard it correctly? I turned to another colleague: did you just hear that? He nodded, smiling.

I tried to work out what to do. My colleague was 18 years old at this time. I was very much an outsider in this place, and the target of the attack was actually more of an insider of the institution. She had been part of the children's chorus of the theatre 1 year earlier, and now was working inside its giant mechanism, as an adult worker. She was German-speaking, and I think did not follow the "joke", which was in English, and spoken quickly, almost breezed over.

Later, we were cycling back, because she lived on the way to my place, a short distance from the theatre. As we were saying goodbye, I said to her, 

"Hey, listen. I want to talk to you about something.

"Sure. What's up?

"Today, there was a joke made in rehearsals, when you were on your knees. Did you understand it?

"No.

"Ok. Do you want to know about it?

"Ok.

I explained to her in a dry, factual way that the joke was about her giving blowjobs, and being good at this. I explained to her that I thought this was "not ok", that it was abuse, and that I would support her if she wanted to take it further within the organisation. She seemed uncomfortable. "Ok, thank you. But I don't think I do." "Ok. Well just keep in touch about it if you want to. I support you." I said goodnight and cycled home.

--

About a month later during dress rehearsals, I was sitting alone behind The Director and the actor in the audience seating as they prepared a scene with the children's chorus, who were all women between 15 and 17. The children's chorus was hiding behind stage backdrops, and should appear at certain points in the music. But there was a problem: They couldn't see the actor, to know that he was there for their cue. The actor came into the audience seating of the grand house, and started talking to The Director about it in the dimly-lit auditorium. The Director suggested making some kind of verbal cue: a grunt or something. Then The Director said:

"Just grunt at them. That's all they're good for, isn't it? You just grunt and they... you know...".**

The actor, a 50-year old who I had seen during drinks with his arm around a different 19-year old colleague after rehearsals, gave a sort of "grimace-grin", seeming to acknowledge that the joke was "a bit risky". I looked around: was I the only one who had heard it this time? Yes. The actor went back onto the stage and grunted his way through the rest of the scene. I sat behind The Director, shadowing him, thinking about what to do.

Berlin: Some Negatively-Geared Historical Complaining

It's sexy to complain about Berlin, so much that it's a virtual necessity to living there. Visitors to the city might scratch the surface of its cultural life, political problems, or social atmosphere, but those who try to live in it can get a deeper understanding, especially of how difficult it is to actually survive here for many people not the beneficiaries of parental trust funds - and of how things are changing. Berlin used to be be both a saviour and a curse at the same time, a city which both compounds and alleviates precarity. But now something entirely else seems to be happening in the city.

I have lived here for 10 years, and never written about it. I'm not in love with Berlin, and I never have been - the pretentious and superficial parts always prevented me from really connecting with it. I live here in a marriage of convenience. The parts that excite me, especially the authentic radical left politics which somehow survived here in our neoliberal context, built discourse, and worked to protect so much that has been destroyed in other places, have largely disappeared or been twisted beyond recognition, even as my favourite low-key haunts have been painted over with designer paints. Now, the city looks and feels to me a lot like any other place, its rough edges smoothened out, with a shiny Big Tech gloss over every street lamp. 

A street scene in Kreuzberg, Berlin. Photo from me.

Since the 90s, Berlin has been in a state of adjustment. The fall of the Berlin Wall created a period of flux that produced a lot of strange phenomena - empty buildings, especially, which were sometimes squatted before being turned into cultural spaces or social projects. These gaps were often filled by hungry investors, conglomerates who plunged money into the former East, often without any plan for how to actually deploy what they bought. Changing governments have faced problems of excessive speculation in a marketplace that no longer services any actual need, with space distributed by a roulette wheel of capital and government interest. The desire to regulate this situation meets the reality of global capitalism, sometimes creating agreements, but more often something like a permanent stasis.

The Glow

Dreams are perhaps one of the original sites of artistic speculation. Like art-works themselves, they hold a mirror up to life, projecting our hidden desires, wants, needs, and compulsions. This makes them a rare site of speculation on authentic truth - insistently unreal, and yet somehow, in that very unreality, revealing of a deeper, otherwise inaccessible reality.

And yet, our conception of dreaming seems to have changed recently. A choir of Big Tech and political interest - having mined our material world to its current limits - turns increasingly to our fantasies as sites of new territorial invasion - our dreams are harvested for their revealing of desires to be relentless deployed in marketing, with individuals acting them out for us in real-time as agents for the objectives of exploitative corporate interest, and self-regulation posing as a solution to problems caused by an increasingly destructive context. In a world of exponential powerlessness, our dreams turn to fantasies of domination and control - fulfilled by apps that measure our brainwaves, streamline our yoga, deliver our sex on-demand, and open the door for AI to occupy the place where human imagination once steadfastly stood.

In a context relatively hostile for dreaming as a human practice, The Glow (Das Leuchten), a new work from Cologne-based SEE! Kollectiv, is refreshingly old-school in its approach to dreaming. Principally a choreographic collaboration from SE Struck, Alexandra Knieps with performance duo Anja Müller and Clara Marie Müller, the piece features live sound composition from Maria Wildeis, who sits on-stage with the sound desk and reacts to the performers gestures. It's bare and stripped-back, with long periods of silence interrupted by interventions that sit on an abject plane, not quite announcing themselves, our attention sitting constantly in the realm of subconscious white noise. 

As it's a dream, The Glow drifts between spaces: German and English languages, theatrical gesture and flowing rhythms of dance, woven together with fragments of historical texts from authors such as Walter Benjamin and Lina Bo Bardi, combined with those of the collaborators. The piece opens with a lazy pulse of light, the soundtrack beginning its wander into the main premise, as though entering sleep. From this space, a dancer (Anja Müller) emerges, their movement bare and empty as the liminal space around them. The first words are pronounced: "I was dreaming of a crash. A frontal, head-on collision. Und überall ein weißes Licht, und das war das Ende." ("and everywhere a white light, and that was the end"). The text begins a symbolic death, a metaphorical killing of the earthly state so that dreams may enter, as the second dancer (Clara Marie Müller) enters and begins to shadow the first in diagonal, somewhat aimless walks across the stage space, eventually exploding into an asymmetrical partnership that fragments and reassembles itself before the audience.

 

Photo: Dieter Hartwig