01.04.2025 Chiara Marcassa: Styling in times of upheaval – costume, fashion and individuality at OPER OTZE AXT

As a costume designer, I understand my job in two ways: on the one hand, I have to develop a visual language with clearly legible characters that support the vision of the directing team and reinforce the plot and role work; on the other hand, I want to offer the audience visual stimuli, inspire and entertain them through my craft. For OPER OTZE AXT, I was asked to design punk costumes for opera singers (or opera costumes for punks?). The East German punk legend ‘Otze’, his five doppelgangers (the archetypal roles of Magician, Shadow, Thug, Injured Animal and Unofficial Employee), his ‘Vadder’ and the citizens of the GDR (as a choir) were to be outfitted for three different musical theatre stages in (West) Germany. In the following lines I will now explain some aspects and backgrounds of my design concept for OPER OTZE AXT.

The work began with research into the ‘fashion’ of punks in the GDR, although the term ‘fashion’ should be used with caution at this point. For the early punks, dressing was the opposite of fashion, a gesture of rejection of conformity, of resistance, of the search for individuality. Nevertheless, it is known that Eastern punks imitated the aesthetics of Western punk movements. For the strictly regulated mores of the GDR, where fashion was organised in five-year plans, this represented a form of criticism of the system. In addition, everything had to be made by the punks themselves: everyday clothes were re-sewn, dyed, discoloured, sprayed and labelled. The GDR punks dressed in dark suit trousers or work trousers, often with braces or a high-water cut, combined with trench coats, chequered or dark jackets and rare leather jackets. White shirts with thin ties or self-painted T-shirts were common. They wore safety pins, chains made from toilet flushers, dog strangles or razor blades as anti-jewellery. Their hairstyles were short and shaggy, and their faces were often decorated with black lips, red cat eyes or painted scars. In the beginning, punks dressed quite neatly, albeit with daring styling; later, the ‘classic’ punk look emerged: dirty, torn, stained, patched. Badges, armbands and lettering on clothing displayed band names such as Sex Pistols or Clash as well as political slogans. (Source: Michael Horschig: In der DDR hat es nie Punks gegeben. In: ‘Wir wollen immer artig sein…’ Berlin 1999, pp. 10-22).

During my research, an increasingly urgent question arose: If costume usually transfers the norm of a culture onto the stage, how do you portray a part of society that rejects the system and lives in resistance to it without disarming that in an aesthetic formalisation, turning it into a dead symbol? How can you create costumes that embody the aesthetics of punk in the moment, before it is assimilated and becomes a fashion? How can the interaction between fashion, resistance and the search for one’s own individuality be represented in costume?

The costumes were made almost exclusively by selecting, adapting and combining costume items from the stock of the theatres with which the DDO cooperated as part of NOperas! On the one hand, this way of working is true to the punk ethic, which positions itself as critical of consumption and in which creativity and self-expression emerge from the transformation of found material. In addition, the creation of costumes from the various inventories and in close collaboration with the theatres’ wardrobe masters is a sustainable practice because it conserves material resources, saves costs and strengthens social relationships.

The costumes were therefore created from a mixture of theatre finds and everyday clothing. Relatively quickly, I came up with the idea of experimenting with baroque-style theatre costumes. Baroque costumes are not only colourful, opulent, pompous and decidedly ‘theatrical’ – and therefore perfectly suited to portraying ‘costumedness’. The choice of this period was a metaphor for a turning point, an era of upheaval, crisis and reorganisation. In the early modern period, feudalism collapsed and the free market took its first forms, the power of the church was shaken, modern science and democracy emerged, while wars and social upheavals raged: between the Thirty Years‘ War and the Peasants’ Wars. In the 1980s, the socialist dictatorship of the GDR collapsed, the political system changed from one-party rule to democracy, and capitalism replaced the planned economy. Many people in the GDR experienced the upheaval as existential uncertainty, just as people in the early modern era believed they were close to the end of history. In Stotternheim, a portal opens up between two epochs, a connection between the early modern era and the fall of communism. On stage, the Otze lookalikes repeatedly don and doff baroque jackets and waistcoats. The scenic moves activate new plots – a punk concert, the first visit to the West after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the idea of patricide. They wear black combat boots with steel toe caps and dirty work trousers, their faces are expressively made up with thick eyeliner and dark colour gradients. Meanwhile, the chorus, in grey work clothes, with light-coloured powder, black contact lenses and cheap wigs, portrays the uniformity of mass society from the perspective of the punks. In the third act, shortly before the Wall is opened, the magician announces: ‘Come and see. / The wheel of history has turned for the last time.’ The image of the wheel appears in the costume design in the form of a figure-of-eight ruff, which is worn by all the actors – a baroque fashion accessory that unmistakably symbolises that time of transition. Luther, Otze, preaching and performing, the baroque and the turning point…

In OPER OTZE AXT, historical costumes were transferred to a foreign sign system, where they encountered work clothes, used fabrics and improvised additions. This refraction posed the question of the ‘costume-ness’ of fashion and the performative act of dressing – not only in punk, but also in relation to the main character Otze and his era. At the same time, there was a meta-reflection on theatrical means and on how roles can be told visually across epochs. But what does this aesthetic mean in today’s political climate? Has the wheel of history turned again after all? Are we living in a new baroque era, in a turning point in which systems are crumbling and ideologies are being overtaken, in which a new age is being heralded while the old one has not yet disappeared? And if so, how will we dress for it?

One person writes a text, another composes music to these words, and yet another person is then responsible for interpreting what has been created scenically – this is how the work normally takes place where municipal or state theatres are involved in contemporary music theatre. There is nothing fundamentally wrong with this procedure, but there have long been additional ways of working that also lead to other forms. ‘NOperas!’ attempts to introduce them into the music theatre business.
In Darmstadt, OPER OTZE AXT’s play development has now produced its first artistic result. Significant changes were also made during the rehearsal process. The majority of the spoken scenes were cancelled shortly before the premiere. This made the plot more associative and left out a lot of the explanations. ‘The result,’ writes the online magazine “Egotrip”, ’is a coherent 80-minute impression that this theatre, whether grumbling or depressive, is always raging in the minds of the protagonists.’
‘Almost expressionistic’ is how this internalised drama appeared to the Darmstädter Echo after the premiere. In contrast, ‘Egotrip’ feels reminiscent of the form of ‘ancient tragedy’ – on the one hand due to the special role of the chorus, and on the other because of Antonia Beeskov’s commentary voice, an epic element in the style of the classical messenger report.
References to theatre history everywhere. All the way to Rainer Nonnenmann, who is reminded of Hamlet’s father for the silent role of Otze’s father (Martin Gerhardt). None of this seems wrong to me.
‘The epic is at the expense of the drama’ criticises Nonnenmann at the same time. However you judge the whole thing, it’s certainly true: The performance hardly fits into the framework of conventional drama. What is usually told as a psychological plot in the theatre is here packed into a dramaturgy of still images.
The ‘Darmstädter Echo’ is also on the right track when it comes to categorising this project: ‘Despite the title, the term “opera” does not seem appropriate to us,’ it says. Well, even if the word opera appears as a reference in the title, it was never about delivering an opera. After all, the term ‘NOperas’ contains the word ‘opera’ as well as the word ‘no’.
Elections were held in Germany yesterday. 47 out of 50 constituencies in the former territory of the GDR went to the AfD. Did ‘We are the people’ already sound ethnic back then? Provocatively and accompanied by laughter from the audience, OPER OTZE AXT interprets the unification of the two German states as a voluntary self-surrender by East Germany for the price of bananas and welcome money. How quickly the ‘Round Table’ was sidelined at the time, looking for solutions other than simple affiliation. If not as an opera, how could OPER OTZE AXT be categorised? Perhaps as a German-German mystery play about the dialectic of freedom.

For the members of the ‘’Dritte Degeneration Ost (Third Degeneration East)‘’, dealing with Schleimkeim, their frontman Dieter ‘’Otze‘’ Ehrlich and, more generally, with the punk movement of the 1980s is a dive into the realm of distant events. For me, who moved to West Berlin during this time, it is an immersion in memories that are not well organised.
On the façade of the house in the north of Wedding where I first lived, there were still shell impacts from the 1940s. ‘Never again war!’ was the motto in Germany later on, but SPD Chancellor Schmidt had recently pushed through the deployment of medium-range missiles aimed at the East as part of the so-called “Nato Double-Track Decision”. Together with my generation, I also lived in the conviction that the world could blow up in our faces at any moment, and this time for good.
People of the same age had similar thoughts on the other side of the Mauser. But while the churches there were forging swords into ploughshares, we younger West Berliners had already come to terms with the future. We were full children of the economic miracle. But you could read ‘No Future’ on every other corner. This strange end-time feeling was insurmountable. And just like in the 1920s: Berlin, even if this time only its western part, was dancing on a volcano. It wasn’t worth wasting thoughts on the future. We wanted to get as much as possible out of the here and now.

Techno was emerging in this West Berlin of the mid-1980s. Punk, I think, no longer played a really important role as a music genre. It was outdated and commercially appropriated by Neue Deutsche Welle. It had moved on and become something else in the noise excesses of Neubauten.
And yet punk was not dead. Whichever of the individual scenes with their respective dress codes you belonged to in West Berlin: if you didn’t wear black, you could be sure of being turned away by the doorman of any reasonably hip club. The Schöneberg Goths and New Romantics were a kind of post-punks who styled their punky skulls at trendy hairdressers and bought their gold-plated safety pins in expensive fashion shops. They were mainly ‘Wessis’, as they were called in Berlin at the time, who had moved here from West Germany to escape the boredom and hypocritical idyll of West Germany. And there were still the real and proper punks, born in Kreuzberg, Neukölln or Siemensstadt, albeit in a different neighbourhood. They were rarely much older than twenty. You’d inevitably get hit on by them (‘Hey mate, have you got a mark?’) when you got off the underground at Nollendorfplatz or Kottbusser Tor.

Even back then, there were a huge number of homeless people in West Berlin. I had made it a rule to give something to at least every third person who opened their hand. But no punk ever received a single penny from me. Wasn’t there a mum at home who would have been happy to give them a sandwich? To me, they were snotty truants. If I had told them that I was financing my studies by working night shifts on the assembly line at the Reinickendorf pizza factory, wouldn’t they have thought I was a laughable idiot?
I found out in an embarrassing way that punks didn’t exist in the East either when I met three female punks near the border crossing after a visit to the East Berlin opera. I thought they were tourists from West Berlin and tried to make fun of them: ‘Just hurry back over: it’s all grey here, who can stand it!’ I unintentionally showed myself to be the arrogant Wessi type, who – after this word changed its meaning – later incurred the increasing anger of the East Germans.
East punks and West punks, I still find it difficult to connect the two movements. The one rebelled against capitalism, the other against (actually existing) socialism. ‘Break what breaks you!’ sang Ton Steine Scherben back in the 1970s. But what if both were broken then? The anarchists’ “A” adorned the jackets of many punks, at least in West Berlin. What was meant was: ‘Let everyone do what they like!’. Even back then, this struck me as a childishly simplified understanding of the political idea of anarchism, which does not strive for ‘no power for anyone’, but equal power for all and leads to a social system of shared responsibility that is light years away from the punk attitude to life. ‘Why don’t you destroy yourself!’ sang Otze Ehrlich, somewhat logically, five years after German-German reunification. Without ‘No Future’, punk couldn’t be punk and so that was the only consequence that remained.

The story of the GDR punk band Schleimkeim and its singer and guitarist Dieter ‘Otze’ Ehrlich inspires this project by the ‘Dritte Degeneration Ost’ collective.
How does Ehrlich explain his own downfall after the demise of the GDR? Was he unable to cope with the freedom he had previously fought for? Was the freedom he achieved perhaps not the one he had fought for? (Had he, one might ask, fought for anything at all?)
In any case, we are still waiting for the ‘blossoming landscapes’ that Kohl promised for the whole of eastern Germany in 1990. And quite a few of those who cried out for freedom back then are now in favour of abolishing it again.
The basic idea of OPER OTZE AXT remains that Ehrlich’s story tells more than a personal fate, that it has something to do with today’s problems of a united Germany.
Rehearsals in Darmstadt begin in January.
Early December: extensive preparatory meeting with vocal ensemble and musical director. Talks about feXm and NOperas!, about personal perspectives on West and East German history, which differ according to personal background and age. Talks about opera and punk. About working methods and musical approaches.
The composition is a collective responsibility. It is also pluralistic on a vocal level: opera voices (from the Darmstadt ensemble), ‘natural’ voices (from the performers of DDO) and the equipment of Antonia Beeskow, who then puts the vocals through the electronic wringer.
The score was only recently finalised. Much of it remains sketchy and is intended to be freely improvised. Much is still subject to change and adaptation in the rehearsal process.
You can’t get much further away from the usual musical theatre routine with all this. The project demands a considerable amount of experimentation from the soloists involved.
Mezzo-soprano Clara Kreuzkamp brings openness and curiosity. Georg Festl not only sings Figaro and Leporello. He is also a rock guitarist and a self-confessed AC/DC fan. Thomas (Tom) Mehnert brings experience from a wild project at the Munich Biennale. So it all comes down to the afternoon, when the composition team and vocal ensemble go into retreat together. For the ‘’Dritte Degeneration Ost‘’ and for OPER OTZE AXT, this is the hour zero that has been awaited with some nervousness.
How fertile was the morning’s dialogue?
Trying out what you can do with your voice. Improvising. Without sheet music. Absolutely – Frieda Gawenda takes the lead – but with a plan.
Microphones are wired up. Effects devices are connected. The dramaturge and directing team are chased away and sent out into the sleet of the Rhine plain.

What kind of spaces does theatre need?
Nico Sauer’s project ‘Die Kantine’ aims to turn the backstage, workshops and administrative wing into a stage. All these places, which otherwise remain hidden from the audience, first had to be explored by the production team in November.
Both Münster’s and Darmstadt’s old theatre buildings fell victim to air raids during the war. Both of today’s theatres are icons of post-war theatre construction. Both have two stages, each with a similar audience capacity. Otherwise, however, they could hardly be more different.
Münster’s new theatre, which opened in 1956, was squeezed into the preserved or to-be-rebuilt building stock of the old town on the site of the old one. Away from the stage, visitors wander through narrow and winding corridors. There was also little room for the workshops here. Today’s workshops are located far away from the theatre in an industrial area on the edge of the city.
Darmstadt’s theatre, on the other hand, was able to develop on a vast wasteland left behind by the war. It was not built until the late 1960s, in the midst of the ‘economic miracle’. Not only was there a lot of space available, but also considerably more financial power. Even the spacious forecourt (I don’t know of any theatre that has a larger one) demonstrates how generous the planning was here. The backstage area is also spacious and expansive. The two versions of this NOperas! project can only become correspondingly different. Will ‘Die Kantine’ in Münster have to do without the workshops?
Unlike the late new theatre building in Darmstadt, those of the 1950s were still based on the idea of a new beginning, which was also intended as an artistic one after the end of the Hitler years. In doing so, the theatre returned to the years of the pre-war avant-garde. Before Werner Ruhnau was able to live out his ideas a little later with the design of Gelsenkirchen’s new music theatre in a much larger urban space, he had already created a ‘small house’ next to the large stage in Münster, which was designed for flexible seating and enabled more participatory forms than those of the bourgeois peep-box theatre. Mannheim’s new theatre followed a similar inspiration at the same time, where the large and flexibly designed small house could also be combined to form a large arena that the audience could view from two sides.
Today, the two Mannheim theatres have long been permanently separated by a wall that was built at a later date. The flexible use of the ‘second’ venues built in the 1950s, on the other hand, is prevented everywhere by the repertoire – the effort involved in converting the audience area together with the stage night after night, depending on the performance, would be too great.
However, many theatre makers today are looking for immersive forms that involve the audience in the theatre experience. Where you are dealing with a conventional stage space, the tiers and auditorium become additional playing areas, the audience is torn out of the supposed security of a position that is limited solely to watching. (This happened, for example, in the NOperas! project ‘Kitesh’, where the auditorium even became the stage for an armed robbery).
Or, like Nico Sauer, you go one step further – you simply turn the situation around, no longer playing the stage but its exterior space.
Either way, you are playing against the idea of bourgeois illusionary theatre that has turned to stone and hardly corresponds to the challenges of our reality.
Many of the buildings erected after 1945 are now in need of refurbishment. Meanwhile, the theatre of the 19th century has returned to the minds of those responsible for the city. Instead of building the theatre of today and tomorrow, the theatre of yesterday is being restored everywhere. In the process, opportunities are being wasted that only come along once every seventy years.

The design of a stage set is tested at a rehearsal before it goes into production in the workshops. In addition to technical solutions, the focus is also on spatial effects and sight lines. Components are indicated using improvised means. The location is usually the stage on which the play in question will later be performed.

Construction rehearsals as part of ‘NOperas!‘ are a special case. They take place at the first producing theatre. The design must be variable enough to be adapted to the spatial conditions of all the theatres. Departments from the other theatres also travel along for orientation. If there are not too many problems, the atmosphere is that of a professional conference. For the technical departments, it is a rare opportunity to meet and exchange ideas with colleagues from the same trade. Synergies often arise. What is difficult for one organisation can be achieved by the other. People shake hands on technical issues.

One of these special rehearsals was that of OPER ATZE AXT, not in Darmstadt, Bremen or Gelsenkirchen, but in a factory hall in Unterkassel. ‘Dress warmly, the place is unheated,’ emailed production manager Anne Bickert. From the Kassel tram stop with the deceptive name ‘Katzensprung’, it’s a long walk through an industrial area to the company premises at Hafenstraße 76. It’s not cosy there, but you can get a warming cup of coffee in the OBI supermarket 300 metres away. Someone has also brought pre-Christmas macaroons from the OBI bakery – the Christmas madness has begun. They are left lying around after an OBI joke about macaroons and sawdust.

A factory hall instead of a stage. And unlike other construction rehearsals: nothing is improvised here, everything is already in place: the final components, professionally screwed and welded together by the people of the RHO collective. Later, Brigitte, Bremen’s opera director, describes it with irony in her voice on the phone as a building rehearsal ‘that wasn’t one’.

In OPER OTZE AXT, RHO, responsible not only artistically but in this particular case also structurally for the stage, co-operate with ‘Dritte Generation Ost’, one could say they form a ‘sub-collective’ of the DDO people.

For several weeks, RHO worked in Unterkassel with industrial scrap material, some of which was acquired cheaply, some free of charge, taking inspiration from what they found, assembling it in various ways, taking it apart again and reassembling it. Three objects were created in the process: chambers placed on castors that do not attempt to conceal their origins in scrap metal, but actually exhibit them. They rest on decommissioned stage wagons donated by the Staatstheater Kassel, so that alongside Darmstadt, Bremen and Gelsenkirchen, another theatre is now contributing to this production.

For the people from RHO, who otherwise work artistically in the field of exhibitions and installations, the DDO collaboration is their first encounter with the field of theatre. Their work now has to face the theatres in Kassel, especially their safety regulations.

The encounter is also unfamiliar for the theatres. This or that would have to be additionally welded, otherwise the workshops hardly have any work of their own to do. Nevertheless, much here coincides with current trends in the field of performing arts, translating them from the field of stage action into the field of stage sculpture, so to speak: a classic philosophical attempt to define beauty is linked to the idea of differentiating its particular use from any use within the categories of practical realisability. The no-longer-useful on a practical level, to which the throwaway society, in its compulsion to ever more accelerated production, also ever more quickly sticks the rubbish label ‘become useless’, here it appears ennobled as beautiful according to such a definition.

Analogue to the way in which the projects of ‘NOperas!’ in the scenic and musical fields are usually no longer preceded by a precisely defined plan, which then only has to be ‘executed’ in the rehearsal process, this stage is also no longer preceded by a plan on paper. Just as theatre rehearsals in the context of ‘NOperas!’ serve the cautiously experimental process of finding a piece, in which the participating performers play a major role, so here too the material itself was tested and developed. Both coincide with the idea of a theatre that no longer wants to be solely illusion and thus an idealised counter-image to the real world. Just as the performer no longer hides behind make-up and masks as the person they are, and no longer sees their profession solely as ‘pretending’, this stage no longer wants to be read as a mock-up of another, but as a performer of itself.

Culture is not recognised as one of Germany’s national goals. For the majority of politicians, it is a nice-to-have that can be dispensed with without much ado when the belt needs to be tightened. In the context of current budget plans, the weak are hit particularly hard, as they lack institutional protection and their art is too new and unruly to serve the state, city or country for representational purposes: Welcome to the independent scene!

It will now be even more difficult for independent music theatre, whose existence as an artistic field with its own forms has to be explained again and again, even to cultural politicians. Unlike in Belgium and the Netherlands, for example, there is no separate funding for its art – within the institutions of the funding system, it competes on the one hand with the field of music, and on the other with performance, theatre and dance, and is of course usually more expensive than these and therefore often loses out when it comes to the allocation of funds. As part of the planned cutbacks to the ‘’Musikfonds‘’ and the ‘’ Fonds Darstellende Künste‘’, it is now losing out even further.

The ‘’Fonds Experimentelles Musiktheater‘’ was created as an initiative aimed first and foremost at municipal theatres and the contemporary expansion of their music theatre repertoires. Since the establishment of the NOperas! programme, it has provided even more valuable services in this direction: several theatres can participate, and the door is in principle open to any theatre. But it also serves independent music theatre. The aim is to bring the newer forms of independent theatre into the municipal theatre and to close the aesthetic gap that still separates the two.

However, only one production can be realised per season with the available funds. For the theatres, that is already quite a lot. For the large number of independent music theatre performers who compete for this production every year, it may not seem like much at first. However, it is more than nothing. At feXm, teams also find conditions for processual and sustainable work that they can only dream of elsewhere. In these difficult times, the feXm offers the scene even more important support.

Bremen, which has been involved for 2 x 3 years, will leave NOperas! from next autumn. After 1 x 3 years, Gelsenkirchen (artistic director Michael Schulz is moving to Saarbrücken) will also no longer be part of the programme. Darmstadt will begin its second three years. The Münster Theatre will join as a new partner.

From 40 applications for the 2025/26 season, the jury initially selected five finalists, who then took part in an in-depth discussion in Wuppertal. At least two of the concepts presented would have liked to have been realised. The contract was awarded to ‘Die Kantine’ from the team led by Nico Sauer. The participating establishments also bravely agreed on a project that breaks with established routines and poses challenges for their operations.

A comparison of previous NOperas! productions shows that very different paths lead beyond the opera form in music theatre today. The first to establish music theatre beyond opera in the 1960s came from the musical side. These were composers who strove for ‘visible music’ and expanded their material from the auditory to the visual. The ‘composers’ theatre’ of those years continued to branch out and developed into multimedia artists such as Nico Sauer, who saw himself as a composer, author and theatre maker at the same time.

‘NOperas!’ was still in labour pains when COVID broke out in 2019. The doors of the theatre were closed, the theatre was looking for ways out in the no-man’s land of the digital and – as it lacked a recognisable counterpart – in a preoccupation with itself. The problematisation of hierarchies and power structures in its own field of work has not let go of the stage ever since. In this project too, as its title suggests, theatre revolves around theatre. The playful revelation of its machinery of illusion based on the division of labour in a look behind the scenes, which in turn appears to be theatre and therefore manipulated, raises questions about the relationship between art and reality and the increasingly complicated search for truth that will continue to occupy us for some time to come.