31.10. - ‘OPER OTZE AXT’ construction rehearsal in Unterkassel. Bottom: In the middle ground left Markus Pockrand), right Bernd Klein (technical director of Theater Bremen and Staatstheater Darmstadt). © Roland Quitt
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.
