The 62nd Berliner Theatertreffen: Stories and Theatrical Spaces That Realize the Past, Present and Future.

Cover Photo provided by DARUM Ranging from restagings of historical dance pieces to AI driven work as well as completely new works and interpretations of classical works by top level world directors, the 62nd Annual Berliner Theatertreffen presented productions that displayed the incredible variety of the contemporary German stage. The “Ten Remarkable Productions” considered several levels of reality; three productions considered artificial intelligence, many could have been considered musical works, several others were driven by language, and all were defined by strong, clear directorial styles.  As has been the case during the recent history of the festival, top level world directors and highly developed, company-driven works contribute to the success of the Theatertreffen; the 2025 version provided exceptional insight into the solid artistic environment that dominates the landscape of the current German and especially Berlin stage.  Despite the numerous cuts to funding and occasional pessimism expressed, the German Stage has once again responded with historically significant work and the future of the Theatertreffen only looks to be more positive.  Unfortunately, given the nature of production scheduling in 2025 it was nearly impossible to see all ten productions live. Thankfully, at least three were available to watch on German Television (3SAT) for much of the Summer, and the number of performances and availability of theatre spaces had diminished somewhat.  Most of the productions featured in the 2025 Theatertreffen have been considered in this review, however it may be that one or more will be featured in a later article due to viewing difficulties.

Sancta Susanna was banned at its 1921 planned premiere at Stuttgart Opera due to its insinuation of lewd subject matter according to historical archives. Paul Hindemith’s 1920 opera considers the sexual awakening of a nun; the original libretto includes a scene that calls for the nun to take off her habit and stand naked in front of the collective in order to display her need and desire for sexual engagement.  Fast forward 100 years to Mecklenburg, Germany, where Sancta had its 21st Century premiere.  Directed by Florentina Holzinger, an artist known for her productions displaying naked female bodies, the work featured an entire stage full of naked women for the bulk of the performance and provided incredible commentary on the historical issues dealt with in the text as well as the state of the contemporary church, religion and the world in general for that matter.  

Holzinger’s work was incredibly well conceived and executed; it served as an incredible landmark for the German stage in the boldness of the creation of an original aesthetic – the reverence of the naked female form.  While it was conceived at the Mecklenburgish’s Straatstheater, the legacy of Holzinger, an Austrian dancer/choreographer, has been at the Berliner Volksbühne and her work, better than any other contemporary director at the festival, seemed to embody that tradition of Frank Castorf and the incredible aesthetic and unparalleled “edginess” that was characteristic of Castorf at the Volksbühne.  Because the work played in the theatre, there was an amazing fit between the challenges of the SANCTA, the elements of production previously realized on the Volksbühne stage, the nature of the way that the material was presented and the use of onstage as well as offstage and pre-taped video sequences.  The single set included numerous challenging areas; basically, a stage “obstacle course,” because, in addition to the multimedia elements such as a multiple screens as well as actors holding cameras and recording onstage action,  the elements of both a climbing wall as well as a competitive ramped skating velodrome were included into the stage design.  All of those elements were complemented by a singularly unique device that is currently apparently unnamed.  I have reached out to numerous sources and no one can provide a name to the amazing piece of machinery that consisted of an approximately twelve foot high solid base obelisk shaped figure that had a single working arm capable of lifting and displaying both very heavy as well as very light objects with incredible clarity and dexterity.  Something of a robot-figure, the device was used throughout the production, lifting humans, small objects and numerous elements required by Holzinger’s telling of this miraculous story.  The video elements were outstanding and included live time, onstage taping of numerous elements in addition to pretaped and historical video sequences.  Characteristic of many previous Castorf works, the element of an arriving figure into the theatre via a video stream was utilized; however in this case the character of Jesus was realized as arriving late to the performance.  Captured in a live time video sequence the scene was played by the incredible German actress Annina Machaz  and after her arrival onstage she engaged in an elaborate onstage discussion with the audience, driven by the delivery of a comical sequence of events that resulted in a number of hilarious, comic scenes that also involved many of the naked women already onstage.  The work also directed its attention to numerous actual stories of physical abuse and sexual activity (rape, physical groping, adultery) within the church.  These were presented as “confessionals” utilizing the multimedia environment and several previously taped scenes were also included.

The work included so many incredible scenes it would be a difficult task to list them all. However, during one sequence an actress “stood in” for the role of Jesus each evening of the three TT performances and an actual small scale operation took place. Apparently, during each performance a surgical procedure took place with each of the three actresses having a very small portion of their skin surgically removed and the entire process revealed on camera.  The small, circular portion of skin was then actually fried live on stage in a small pan with the same video process recounting that as well.  Later, the small fried piece of flesh was used to demonstrate the biblical phrase “this is my flesh..”  More than any work I have seen at the Volksbühne in over 20 years, the work managed to forward the amazing aesthetic developed by Castorf and to really push the limits of theatrical production.  The result was an amazing work that, in the spirit of Artaud, shook audience members to the very core of their being.  Sancta established Holzinger as one of Europe’s most sought after directors.  

Unser Deutschlandmärchen was a Theatertreffen selection to celebrate the substantial Turkish community and the story of their long history in Germany.  Based on the novel by Dinçer Güçyeter with dramaturgy and direction by Hakan Savas Mican the work had been produced by Gorki Theater as part of the 2023-2024 season. The setting of the piece was in Cologne, and involved the lifetime of a family from Turkey that had relocated to Germany and it involved a period of time through the 1980s and 1990s that involved the family’s life in Germany.  Their view of Germany came from the standpoint of being immigrants to the country, and was central to the story yet the style of the work, somewhat Brechtian in form. Several musical numbers, most of which did not really advance the plot, were included in the show and the onstage band of five musicians played an important part in the production.  The flow of the action and the telling of the story of the Turkish immigrants was the key element of the production and the goal was quite obviously to utilize a very audience friendly manner in which to make it happen.  Many musical numbers in a somewhat concert style were included.  The work utilized a Brechtian/concert style format and slides emphasized key chronological times during the family’s life in Germany. At the point when the story landed in 1999, having begun in the early 1980s,  a musical number entitled “I Want More Hard Rock” was sung by the the work really highlighted the family struggles of immigrants and the difficulties that so many Turkish migrants to Germany had endured.  The work should be considered a musical, and utilized many original as well as popular interpolated Turkish songs into the story. The work was a rock music revue and featured numerous individual performers and musical scenes that developed the story of the Turkish family and their struggles while living in Germany.  The work begins and ends with letters from Dinçer to his mother and ends in the same format.  The supporting elements of the Gorki Theatre made sure that the performance was given the strongest theatrical system.  The production was extremely well realized and easily figured into the “Ten Remarkable Productions” as a representative production.  

Another nominated work that came from the  Deutsches Schauspielhaus Hamburg (an incredibly rare occurrence) included Bernarda Alba’s Haus directed by Katie Mitchell.  The Lorca original included numerous scenes of tension and implied violence as the dominating matriarch of the established Spanish family was intent on preserving the “honor” of her deceased father and the legacy that he had established.  Mitchell’s world for the play recounted the 2002 case of the Tuchol family in Riverside, California, where the father and mother managed to quarantine a family of four girls until many were in their mid-late 30’s and had never had any meaningful contact with the outside world.  Mitchell’s world as created for Bernarda Alba was unrelenting; the four daughters were allowed no contact with the outside world; groceries were delivered to the house to prevent them from leaving the house and the girls spent much of their time in a group sewing room where they made all of their own clothing.  The guider of the oppression, played by Julia Wieninger was unrelenting in her portrayal of the controlling and incredibly violent matriarch that held her daughters captive for many of their formative years.  Mitchell’s directorial style naturally pushed the world to its extreme and the world became a complete prison.  The stage design, beautifully realized by Alex Eales allowed both the stage (and eventual) film audience to realize the individual scenes of distress and horror that were part of the house that had been created by Bernarda Alba. 

Mitchell’s reimagination of the text included a world of several male characters who lurked outside attempting to interact with the four beautiful daughters of Alba.  This element was made possible due to the Eale’s “doll house” design that allowed the audience to see characters in multiple spaces simultaneously.  It was particularly effective near the end when numerous violent actions took place in separate rooms; as Adele, Linn Reuse’s spectacular suicide scene was then countered by a group mass suicide as all of the daughters, with the exception of Amanda who managed to escape, were forced to take a deadly dosage of Fentanyl.  The horrific ending to the story was “classic Katie Mitchell” and, as is typical of her work, managed to clearly define the Lorca classic into the contemporary world. 

Double Serpent is Sam Max’s fantasy play that presents a male dominated world devoid of any female influence and explores the reality of that oppressive environment in something of a video game style. Directed by established German director Ersan Mondtag and commissioned by the Hessisches Stadtsheater Wiesbaden who realized the work of the newly emerged New York based artist, the staging was guided by a movement style driven by a specific soundtrack so that many of the character’s movements were underscored by carefully timed sound or musical details, such as a walking steps or other repeated movements.  The storyline centered around Connor, a young man and Felix, an established movie producer.  However, so many other issues emerge as time is fractured in the work and Felix returns to his past where a game called “Double Serpent” was played for a short time on computers prior to it’s being banned.  It was there that he played the game with his imaginary friend “Eric,” but a much larger issue emerged later in the work as it was revealed that at some point Felix drugged him and harvested his organs for use for some undisclosed reason. Clearly the work was realized in a highly surreal manner and seemed to come from the standpoint of a dream where many events occurred but often the events were unrelated and did not often make sense in a concrete manner.  There was one scene where Felix asked Connor to stand mid stage and a chorus of four naked men facing upstage stood in front of him around a “hot tub” – the intent was a group sex act directed toward Connor to be watched by Felix but the scene was not played out to fruition.  Double Serpent dealt with numerous issues related to nightclub and party culture.  The use of K (short for Ketamin, a popular party drug) was referenced throughout the play.  According to the writer Max the story is based in the world of teens who consistently engage in the world of online gaming and interaction.  Also the ideas of masculinity were explored - Max correctly noted that typically male driven stories leaned into the world of thriller or even horror stories.  This work explored a highly controlled world where the politics and ruling authority was gauged in another manner.  The staging of Max’s imaginary world presented the many combined elements of a (perhaps) toxic male driven society, and the results were an emotionless, physically driven world that exhibited pure male power and control.  

End of Life was a performance installation created by DARUM (Vienna, Austria)  and written, conceived and directed by Victoria Halper and Kai Kröschoe.  Engagement with this virtual production was both a difficult and emotionally demanding challenge.  Given a specific time by the Festspielhaus staff, audience members were instructed to arrive early and to prepare for a virtual experience of approximately two hours.  Once taken into space, each audience member was given a headset that basically removed them from their physical world and placed them into an environment that engaged them visually with a virtual world where they would occasionally be required to move, bend down and occasionally lean, but mostly just required to be present in a standing position. The nature of the story that developed led into a discussion about many elements:  the future of humanity, our concern for the sanctity of life, and the nature of how we view the prolonging of life. 

Central to that discussion was the case of a young woman named Lisa with whom each audience member was taken on a journey with.  There were many stops along the way and choices were given to each audience participant in order to craft an individualized journey.  

The virtual world created by the production team was incredibly well realized, thus the nomination as one of the best performance experiences in the German world for 2024-2025.  Produced in Vienna the work provided those who were able to experience the work with a once in a lifetime experience.  As an audience member you were engaged with some difficult situations, encountered some scary characters and were taken on an amazing journey that is very unique and, in the end, quite beautiful. One’s journey with Lisa was genuinely personal, and the conversations seemed uniquely authentic.  On many occasions the participant was alone with Lisa and her conversations and reactions were stunningly realistic.  The production truly revealed the both wonderful but also horrifying realities afforded by the virtual world. Participants were forewarned about the physical demands of the production and there were drinks and food items available as participants finished the performance due to the potential physical reactions involved.

Frau Carrar’s Rifles, produced by Residenztheater München was presented in the Probebühne, the smaller, more intimate space of the Berliner Festspielehaus.  Directed by Luise Voight, Brecht’s play deals with a group of immigrants living in a war zone during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). The work is generally considered to be an adaptation of John Millington Synge’s Riders to the Sea and in Brecht’s script  focuses on Teresa Carrar who is seeking to protect her children during the difficult war times. The production aesthetic emulated a black and white 1930s movie, as the characters utilized dark costumes and white face makeup and the setting consisted of a single whitewashed room that included black and white furniture. The overall sense of the work was that of old cinema; however, the work primarily focused on the delivery of the text.  In the case of this work it suffered from a reliance on the Brecht text to speak to a contemporary audience.  The work was played in a very direct and filmic style and fell extremely flat on the night I saw it.  Sadly, the work did not reveal a great deal of action so the static nature of the dialogue along with the lack of consistent movement and action made the work feel tedious. The visual style was an impressive element and the performers of the Residenztheater are always among the best of the German speaking stage.  

Deutsches Schauspielhaus Hamburg’s Die Machine Oder: Über Allen Gipfeln ist Ruh (sometimes translated as Time Machine) was conceived by French playwright/novelist George Perec and utilized Goethe’s famous poem “Wanderers Nachtlied” as the central focus of an AI driven experiment that revealed on the stage the working process behind  a computer’s interpretation of a classic literary work and the many processes that differentiate the human analysis of words and semantic sequences to the analysis of those same sequences by a non-human AI based group of sources.  Featuring five actors who emulated the nature of computer-like reactions and analysis of the poem, the performers, led by a supreme guiding force, were all involved in the consistent analysis, interpretation and (sometimes) negotiation of the meaning and relevance of particular words.  The staging of the work, brilliantly arranged by director Anita Vulesica ultimately realized an incredible “machine-like” work and the actors movement’s, delivery and focus were all driven by their place in the machine. Discussions consisted of the analysis of grammar, the usage of certain words as well as an even further analysis of the usage of the number of vowels in a sequence of words.  The main purpose was comedic but did reveal some very pertinent ideas about inconsistencies in written language (the work was directed towards both German and English) but the real comedic moments were revealed in both the spoken German text and the projected English subtitles.  It was clear that the comedy was actually present in both languages, which is not always true.  The real strength of this work lay in the precise timing and physical movement of the actors who truly engaged with the machine-like concept of the work, which looked back to the world of Expressionism and works like From Morn to Midnight and Machinal. 

Sadly, Ja, Nichts ist OK would be the final work of director Rene Pollesche at the Volksbühne Am Rosa Luxembourg Platz. Pollesche had just taken over at Berlin’s great public stage as Indendant following the turbulent years after the ousting of Frank Castorf, the longtime leader of one of Berlin and Germany’s great historic theatre companies.  Pollesche died just after the mounting of the work, which was apparently somewhat autobiographical and revealed some of the many issues the theatre director, devisor, and writer had been dealing with during his many decades career on the German stage.  The work was primarily a one man show that featured long-time collaborator Fabian Henrich’s, in a work that featured discussions and arguments among a number non present flatmates – questions that defined human existence such as Hamlet’s “To Be or Not to Be” speech that was quoted.  The text was a stream of consciousness work that was often directed at the audience with the assistance of a hand-held microphone.  As the sole performer, Henrich often took moments to speak directly to the audience about his personal and life issues and to engage in live comic banter with the audience; a few smaller and supernumerary characters eventually appeared as the performance concluded with numerous figures from his past joining him on stage.  In the spirit of the Volksbühne it was clear that these individuals were not trained performers but random individuals brought onstage for the work’s short ending each evening.  

The most striking element of the production was the setting. A classic Volksbühne setting with a revolve, the onstage house included a small swimming pool and could be rotated in 360 degree format to reveal the home interior as well.  With the addition of a rock band (typical at the Volksbühne) the underscoring of the physical action of the piece, which was much more prominent than the use of language in the work, was a unifying element of production of this primarily movement based work.  The work included an onstage pool (common in Volksbühne productions) and in several scenes Henrich took very violent falls into the pool to indicate various moments in his life and story.  

One of the most anticipated and best received works was Pina Bausch’s masterpiece Kontakthof: Reflections of 1978, restaged by her longtime assistant Meryl Tankard and utilizing numerous company members from her many decades career as a choreographer.  Numerous individuals stood outside with signs requesting an opportunity to witness the work live as all three Theatertreffen performances were totally sold out.  However, it was possible to see the work in an upstairs overflow environment at the Festspielhaus.  Having seen it the night before, I was so hypnotized and attracted by the work that I was willing to pay for an overflow ticket to see it a second time. There was not a comparable work that I have seen at the Theatertreffen to match the incredible aesthetic and nostalgic feel that this work was able to produce.

The work was performed in a classic Bausch setting – an open space that looked like a cross between a classroom dance space and a space where people who lived in a retirement community might meet and gather.  It was an open space with a number of chairs lined up around the walls of the space but it also had a small, curtained stage directly upstage center, which made it appear to be something of a community performance space.  Utilizing both frontal and rear screens for projection of video and images, the performers, incredibly seasoned European and American professional dancers aged from 62 – 80, physically recreated the scenes staged by Bausch in 1978,  Thankfully, the staging was not unusually technically challenging from a professional dancer’s standpoint, and the scenes all took place in a community setting among young people attending a general social gathering. Simplicity, pedestrian style and repetition were defining elements of the work, and numerous key repeated gestures really drove the style; in a singular sequence these consisted of a smile to the audience, rotation of the hands in the front of the body, and then hands placed on either side of the head. This was done in a repeated fashion for at least 15 minutes during one sequence and the nature of repetition and the matching of the live performers with video sequences was mesmerizing. The real beauty of the work was the story told of the past experience and the incredible nostalgia of the moments shared among the individuals who lived the experiences of the time.  The time was portrayed as one of a beautiful world when people were happy and life was grand; however, it was a clearly male dominated world and Bausch’s original staging reveals many of the unpleasant elements like the incredible loneliness of the female characters and times when they were treated with disrespect or even groped by the male figures. The music was unparalleled; classic music from the 1920’s in Germany revealed a time of great hope and prosperity, and featured traditional songs from Berlin swing era composers like Ralph Bernatzky and Leo Monossen whose “Im Rosengarten von der Plata” and other classic Berlin tango-like musical numbers were used.  The connection between the younger characters in black and white video on the numerous screens contrasted with the much older live dancers who matched or complemented the visual dance scenes and the result was a high degree of artistry.  The fact that these seasoned dance individuals revisited this world and presented it to a contemporary audience made the work something of a masterpiece to be seen once in a lifetime, and, amazingly, it met that challenge.  Just before the intermission of each production, the actors came and sat before the audience, each delivering a short speech about themselves and their career, focusing on some trivial aspect of life such as Lutz Förster who stated  “each day my wife gets up and makes me breakfast and I wash the dishes.”Kontakthof: Echoes of 1978 was a defining work of the 2025 Theatertreffen as it sought to explore multiple times and places utilizing a variety of means to transport audiences into both past and future spaces of reality. 

The 2025 Theatertreffen was both a festival of the exploration of new means of  production as well as one that included and reimagined the past.  Diverse and innovative voices were realized throughout the festival, and the work of numerous directors, performers, designers, other artistic figures, and theatre companies once again brought forth many ideas and theatrical forms that expanded the possibilities of the world stage. Numerous individuals were recognized at the Festival’s completion: Carmen Steinart was given the Alfred-Kerr-Acting-Award for her performance in BLUTBUCH (not reviewed here), Christopher Rüping received the Theatre-Award-Berlin and the 3sat Award was given to Anita Vulesica. Consistently, the German stage drives world theatre in terms of content/ literary material as well as its display of technical innovation through many mediated sources.  The Theatertreffen remains a treasure that presents the most prolific  theatre production that the German speaking world has to offer.