(Intro: Radical budget cuts in the cultural sector of the Netherlands
have caused disquiet and debates about high culture even in Germany.
However, do we really need what the German punk poet Rainald Goetz
once sneeringly called “Kulturverteidigung” (“defence of culture”)? Or
should we rather develop a whole new concept of culture? A new term
that is guided by questions of production and cooperation, rather than
antiquated needs of representation? Such questions are asked by
independent theatre maker Alexander Karschnia in his article on
protests in the cultural arena in Italy and Holland. His performance
group andcompany&Co. has resided in the Netherlands for many years.
Together with Dutch and Belgian collaborators they are going to
present a new piece on the topic early 2012 entitled The (Coming)
Insurrection According to Friedrich Schiller).
CULTURAL COUNTERREVOLUTION GAINING GROUND
By Alexander Karschnia
“Through car-free streets I walk to the Odéon. A young man in the
centre aisle of the theatre is leading the discussion. An amazing
experience, still: Someone is speaking from one of the golden boxes,
handsome and serious faces, finally no longer bored, turn into that
direction, arguments are streaming back and forth in the world’s
longest dialogue, which has now been going on for days around the
clock. (...) Never again, not even when this will be past, will this
theatre be a ‘normal’ theatre for me, because this scene is
unforgettable.”
Paris, May, 1968, described by Cees Nooteboom for a Dutch newspaper.
For several weeks, revolting students had occupied the Théâtre de
l’Odéon and used it as a gathering place. Rome, June, 2011, a similar
scene: Rome’s most ancient extant house, the Teatro Valle, was
occupied by Lavoratrici e Lavoratori dello Spettacolo (male and female
workers of the theatre: actors, directors, designers, stage callers,
light board operators, sound engineers) demanding to preserve the
famous theatre house. Founded in 1727 as a concert stage, it saw the
first performance of Pirandello’s Six Persons are Looking for an
Author 90 years ago. The play’s experimental dramaturgy laid the
founding stone for a new era of Italian theatre. For 60 years, the
theatre had been controlled by the national authority Ente Teatrale
Italiano (ETI), which had ultimately opted for privatisation, prior to
its own dissolution. In June, it was taken over by its staff: “All of
them together keep a theatre going which has not had any official
managing director since the beginning of June,” Spiegel online wrote.
Protests were voiced by more than 8000 citizens and international
theatre makers, including Thomas Ostermeier from Germany. In the
course of summer, nearly the entire cultural establishment of Italy
joined the protest: it is ironical that precisely on the 150th
anniversary of Italy’s national unification, a theatre that would be
eminently suitable for a ‘national theatre’ is for sale. Occupants and
their supporters demand a publicly funded house with transparent
operating structures, dedicated to developing contemporary
dramaturgies and to teaching and training, which is capable of
realizing international co-productions, like the Royal Court Theatre
in London, the Theatre de la Colline in Paris or Berlin’s Schaubühne.
An ‘ecological principle’ is wanted, “between small and big
productions, training and guest performances; fairness of wages,
including fixed minimum and maximum wages; an affordable and
progressive policy with regard to admission fees; independent
supervisory bodies, transparency and legality through online
publication of balances; drafting an ethical codex as a model for all
theatre houses and groups in Italy.” And – hopefully – beyond!
Italian civil society had already rejected nuclear power as well as
the privatisation of water and the legal special treatment of
politicians this year; now Roman theatre workers declared culture a
‘common wealth’, and “free access to culture, knowledge, freedom in
distributing ideas and the strengthening of critical thinking an
essential component of civil rights.” In principle, we may agree with
this, yet we need to ask whether the theatres they mention as examples
really achieve this. The Art Workers’ Document by another group of
Italian curators, artists, and activists goes further. Attempting to
analyse their situation within the framework of general
transformations of the welfare state, which after all was also a
‘cultural state’, they warn against the widening gap between the
public sphere and the sphere of cultural production. Their demand to
reform this state goes far beyond the demand for state-funding and de-
privatisation: it is this cooperative and collective dimension of
their work which must be respected and actively protected, instead of
mechanically reciting the neoliberal harangue of self-responsibility,
creativity, flexibility, and mobility. This is precisely what is
happening at Teatro Valle every night, when its doors open for
meetings, discussions, and performances, partly by prominent artists
such as Bernardo Bertolucci, Nanni Moretti, and many more, who declare
their solidarity. Occupants were delighted during the summer:
“Already, we are over Berlusconi...”
This is what occupants of the Odéon were thinking back then, too:
after many nights of fighting on the barricades, overwhelming mass
protests by students and workers and a wild general strike, which had
brought the country to a halt for almost a month, nobody would have
imagined that the ‘General’ (de Gaulle) who had fled the country would
score this high in the elections a few weeks later. But the points of
departure in France, 1968 and Rome, 2011 are very different: while
l’Odéon was chosen as a meeting place during a whole series of
occupations of universities and businesses, the occupation of the
theatre house in Rome is a singular event. An event, however, that
could be the prelude to a new social cultural movement – in all of
Europe and beyond. For the field of culture is as fiercely contested
as never before. We are indebted to the Italian Antonio Gramsci for
his concept of ‘cultural hegemony’, which implies – in short – that
the (non-material) superstructure has its own dynamics, which acts
upon the (material) ‘basis’ (relations of production). While the
activists of 1968ff. followed this realization with Mao’s slogan of a
‘cultural revolution’ and Situationist phrases on their lips, today,
however, we are facing a ‘cultural counterrevolution’ – where the
basis immediately affects the superstructure: anywhere in Europe,
whether in England, Hungary, Italy, Slovenia or the Netherlands,
cultural expenses are slashed. The Netherlands are an extreme example:
a right-liberal minority government, which can only remain in power
with the support of extreme right-wingers, decided budget cuts by 20%
of 200 million Euros (from 900 to 700 millions). The performing arts
are hit especially hard: here, the cuts amount to more than 50%, in
dance, music and fine arts over 40%. While big, representative houses
and groups are protected, funding of the middle sector is dropped
completely: free production houses and alternative festivals no longer
figure in the governments’ calculations. Usually, such scenarios are
familiar only from economy or hostile takeovers. Or from wars. Irony
of history: not until German occupation was state-funded theatre
introduced to the Netherlands.
The government’s culture struggle is not directed against the model of
German theatre, but against the model which emerged from the protests
against the former – by two tomatoes being thrown: Actie Tomaat was
the name of a student campaign against a performance by the
Nederlandse Comedie in 1969. More tomatoes followed, as well as a
stink bomb and three months of heated discussions after – and
sometimes during – performances. Successfully: the minister of culture
back then reacted with reforms, and immediately changed the funding
system. From then on, not only big, existing institutions were
supported, but also groups and theatre collectives such as
“werkteater” which closely collaborated with young dramatists such as
Judith Herzberg. During the following four decades, a completely
distinct cultural landscape evolved, with independent ensembles, free
production houses, new university courses, and an institutional
infrastructure that had given rise to the “miracle of Dutch
theatre” (Hans-Thies Lehmann). Thanks to this campaign, Dutch theatre
came to be the model for all “iconoclasts” of the stage/theatre ? - a
structural reform Germany is still waiting for! As every independent
theatre maker knows: the municipal theatre of a small provincial town
has a larger budget than the so-called ‘independent scene’ in Germany.
Only during the past few years, cautious steps were taken towards a
convergence of the ‘independent scene’ and the system of municipal and
state theatres.
In Germany, the revolt of ‘68 led, above all, to the establishment of
a so-called ‘director’s theatre’ (‘Regietheater’), where directors in
their productions emancipated themselves from the idea of a
‘faithfulness to the original’ as well as from the author’s ghost. The
Netherlands, in contrast, saw the emergence of a series of collectives
creating their own repertoire. Thanks to state-funding and public
recognition of their work, these groups were able to operate for
extended periods of time, some of them for more than thirty years.
In Germany, such independent groups usually disappeared after a few
years only. They were either dissolved or absorbed into the existing
system. The latter remained an exception, for the municipal and state
theatres are part of a closed system caught between nationally
recognized educational establishments, hierarchically organized
institutions with a large number of unwritten laws, and an extensive
bureaucratic administrative body. The Dutch theatrical landscape is
now heading towards just such a closed system. Thus, already in 2009 –
exactly forty years after the first tomatoes being thrown – BIS (basic
infrastructure) was created, connecting eight theatre houses with
eight training institutions. If it were for the government’s plans,
this infrastructure would be the only thing to remain of Dutch
theatre. Those 21 independent production houses which saw the rise of
an extremely heterogeneous, innovative and, above all, a productive
theatre and dance scene, should no longer have a place in this
cultural landscape, which is merely concerned with issues of
representation. (In comparison: all of Germany has only one-third of
Holland’s number of comparable independent houses, one-third of which
are in the neighbouring county of North Rhine-Westphalia).
This is an irony of history, too: while the German system of municipal
theatres is struggling for reforms inspired by the Dutch model, the
Dutch system is being restructured according to the German model. At
the same time, the big shining lights of German municipal theatre are
Dutch and Belgian, respectively: Johan Simons (director of the Munich
Kammerspiele since this year) and Luk Perceval (director of Thalia
Theatre, since last year) – both of whom owe their artistic careers to
this very model. Many prominent artists of the German state and
municipal theatres have pointed out this fact in an urgent letter to
the Dutch minister of cultural affairs.
Worlds turned upside down! However, haven’t relations between the Low
Lands and Germany always been – let’s say: complementary? Or how come
one country succeeds in revolution, while the other only produces
classical drama about it? I am talking about the Eighty Years’ War,
which in the rest of Europe is known only as the Thirty Years’ War
(since it lasted only thirty years everywhere else apart from the
Netherlands, because the Dutch had taken up arms against the Spanish
superpower fifty years earlier). And about Schillers Don Carlos and
Goethes Egmont. While Germany was completely devastated and depressed
after thirty years of war, the Dutch were finally independent and
autonomous after eighty years of war, as the first country in Europe!
Later the Dutch rejected Greater Germany’s generous offer to revert
those 400 years of error which had caused both countries to grow apart
from each other, when they decided not to gratefully integrate into
the “Thousand-Year Reich” as blonde blood brothers. They merely
examined and took over the fully finalised funding plans for theatres,
which Germans had left on the desks of their office of culture and
propaganda – and were firmly resolved to ward off any exertion of
influence on the part of the state: season tickets, permanent
positions for actors, social insurance etc. The social protection of
artists in the Netherlands was on a level that performing artists in
Germany (like ourselves) can only dream of (Berlin is currently trying
to reinforce minimum wages).
And yet: in the Netherlands, we nowadays frequently hear that an
entrenchment of theatre, i.e. a cultural mandate, had never existed in
the consciousness of the people here as it did in Germany. On the
contrary: people prove to be quite receptive to the new populism.
Obviously, art and culture are considered “leftist hobbies”, not only
by the extreme right-winger Geert Wilders. According to Johan Simons,
artists are met with “downright hatred”: “there is an atmosphere where
you better don’t mention that you’re an artist or have read more than
100 books.” The slashes in culture have not diminished but rather
increased support for the government. And thus, even the Raad voor
Cultuur (Dutch Council of Culture, the government’s independent
advisory body) had to acknowledge that it was not about necessary
limitations - Noodgedwongen Keuzen – but about something entirely
different. All constructive suggestions proposed to the government of
how to arrive at savings in the least harmful way were wiped off the
table (a singular event). Instead, a Cultuuromslag (cultural turn) was
pronounced: ‘Cultural Counterrevolution.’ This clear-cutting of
culture is part of wider campaign. The government has discovered
artists as a new social group to back up populist politics: “subsidy-
eater” (analogous to the “petrol-eating” car) is one of the kinder
terms which are presently heard on the part of the government. The
horrified liberal public helplessly speaks of a ‘new vandalism’ - a
new “iconoclasm”. On the part of the government.
The tragedy that is currently unfolding in the Netherlands should be a
lesson to the rest of Europe: in the motherland of liberalism, its
Janus face appears, i.e. the ugliness of the second face now becomes
all the more visible. The process is reminiscent of the changes in
migration politics. Within a short period of time, the previously most
tolerant immigration country became the most repressive. All of a
sudden, the so-called ‘Holland-Test’ consisting of a list of
perfidious questions which each immigrant has to pass, became a model
for all authoritarian right-wing parties in the EU. By and by, all
liberal achievements are collected: artists are only good for
gentrification (such as the dissolution of the red-light district in
Amsterdam), foreigners are no longer permitted to buy soft drugs in
coffee shops (only if they present a European passport are they
allowed to buy hash), while residents can buy them only in prescribed
amounts. Once more we can see: the slim state is the string state –
and neo-liberalism is the real-existing anti-socialism. Many artists
are waking up only now that their own lives are affected. Why have we
have refused for such a long time to show solidarity with other social
groups who do not have job security either, the authors of the Art
Workers’ Document are wondering? After all, we could perhaps be the
ones to develop a new model that would help to overcome the antagonism
of freelance vs. permanent position in favour of a completely new
structure that is simultaneously creative and cooperative. Theatres
have always been excellent gathering places: OCCUPY A THEATRE IN EVERY
CITY, Italian cultural workers are calling out to us. On November 11,
this call was followed by Greek practitioners (Mavili collective) who
occupied the deserted EMBROS theatre in Athens. To be continued…
P.S. In 1977, Noteboom wrote: “Sometimes, when I walk past the
Sorbonne or Théâtre de l'Odéon, I can hardly imagine that May 1968
happened right here in front of my eyes, - the masses of people, the
tension, the banners, the sense of humour, the hopes and
disillusionment.” Finally, once again, the theatre had become what he
had not considered possible anymore: a ‘normal’ theatre. What
Nooteboom felt was – nostalgia, “not about barricades or police
attacks, not about interminable explanations and political
chicaneries, not about all the excitement, the news that happened
right in front of one’s eyes, or fulfilled prophecies of doom, but
about that inexplicable tingle in the air, the almost tangible
expectation, everyone’s complete, touching openness towards everyone
else, the mixture of hope, naiveté, strategy and honesty, all of that
which has become invisible now that the world looks like the world.”
What we do need are neither monologues of power, nor dialogues between
power and those who claim to represent us, but a dialogue – amongst
each other: Brecht called it “the Big Discussion”, which was the
precondition for the ‘Big Production’. Cultural workers of the world –
unite! Let fantasy rule! (written on the walls of the Sorbonne).
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