Nico Sauer, Jasna Witkowski, Rosa Coppola (Darmstadt 1-2, Münster 3)
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.
