On September 25, the Volksbühne will be opening its doors once again to start a new season of theatre with Peer Gynt. Nearly everyone gets a break during the theatre’s six-week Sommerpause – but the people behind the scenes were hard at work. On August 14, they came back to the Volksbühne’s workshops weeks early to continue building the Bühne and assembling the Kostüme that they’ve been working on since spring.
It’s indisputable that the shuttering of the theatre workshops would be a cultural loss
On a playbill, one sees a show’s front-facing team listed: director, stage designer, costume designer, lighting director. However, there is a whole host of people – 47 at the Volksbühne – who do the work behind the scenes. The look of each production’s stage usually begins as a digital image, a computer model in the workshop’s office. But once it receives the go-ahead from the director’s team, it’s brought to life by the entire Werkstatt. Led by Stefan Möllers, the various departments – Carpentry, Metalwork, Painting, Decoration – all employ their crafts to manifest the 3D visualisation as a concrete form at a warehouse in Pankow. The process continues on the fourth floor of the Volksbühne itself, where the theatre’s master tailors labour to turn the costume designer’s ideas into reality.
These workshops are all under threat. Berlin’s CDU-led government imagines that shutting down the Volksbühne’s production and centralising all stage-building with the Bühnenservice Berlin – which currently provides services to all other Senate-owned theatres in the city – would reduce the theatre budget. While the matter of cost is one that the Volksbühne disputes, insisting that their in-house workshop is less expensive per hour than what’s charged by the Bühnenservice, it’s indisputable that the shuttering of the theatre workshops would be a cultural loss. All the world might be a stage, but the workshop and each of its workers are a world unto themselves.
Metalwork
There are two rooms dedicated to metalwork at Thulestraße 79: a large garage space and a smaller halogen-illuminated room. In the smaller room, the three metalworkers on staff seem to embrace the intensity of manipulating metal; a skull-and-bones flag hangs on one wall. For Florentina Holzinger’s Ophelia’s Got Talent, they were responsible for the steel-reinforced containers that could hold 15 tonnes of water.
Sculpture
A statue on stage? Some taxidermy? A giant pineapple? This is all created here, in the workshop of theatrical sculpture. Pencil sketches sit next to clay forms, a glimpse of pieces they’ll become as they get increasingly ready for the stage.
Costuming
Above the Volksbühne’s famous mainstage, in light-filled offices on the building’s top floor, the tailors and seamstresses work in two workshops, one for women’s costumes and the other for men’s. Their work is almost always a sprint; as opposed to costuming for an opera, whose dates are fixed at the beginning of the season, the nature of playwriting means that the directorial team is still finalising the concept, script and costumes through rehearsals. These costume makers have about six weeks to bring the designer’s ideas into reality. Still, the atmosphere is relaxed and collegial. In August, they were working on pieces for the October premiere of Constanza Macras’s Goodbye, Berlin.
The costumes are washed of the real (and fake) blood, sweat, vomit, shit, foam and other substances
While they’re always drawing from the wardrobe reservoir that the Volksbühne has built up across its years of operation – overseen by director Ulrike Köhler and the costuming assistant, Jasmina Knitter – the team tends to make 80% of the costumes for the production anew. If such work were outsourced, Köhler says, it would probably be the inverse: 80% of costumes would be bought, 10% created from scratch and 10% drawn from reserves.
Their efforts don’t end with the creation of the costumes, though. It’s almost nonstop at the Ankleide Abteilung, where the costumes are washed of the real (and fake) blood, sweat, vomit, shit, foam and other substances that are involved in the Volksbühne’s high-concept spectacles. It might not be the most glamorous work, but without it, the show could not go on. As Mina Fichte, the Gewandmeisterin of the women’s wardrobe, says about the workshops: “Many people are involved. Many are important for the system. And no one can exist without the other.”
Painting
The Malsaal is where all of the Volksbühne’s banners and backdrops are created. While wood serves as the base for much of the set creation, it is also here that the lacquer and finishes are applied to provide the appearance of stone and other materials, transporting viewers to faraway scenes. In the back hang paintings from past performances, depicting castles and landscapes. On a ventilator duct pipe crawls what seem to be enormous copper bugs. This is what this workshop does: creates a material illusion.
Carpentry
In this enormous room, under the shadow of a gigantic prop pterodactyl skeleton whose provenance no one remembers, the carpentry team works on multiple projects simultaneously. One man is building ladders. Others, including workshop veteran Frank Backmeister, are inspecting a structure that will be part of the Peer Gynt set (the nature of which The Berliner is unable to disclose ahead of its premiere). Franz, a carpentry student completing his Ausbildung, is in the midst of the final project of his training: a credenza.
