“What masque, what music? How shall we beguile / The lazy time if not with some delight?” So asks Theseus in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. He’s asking about an evening, but it’s the question theatregoers ask every summer as so many of the indoor institutions take their usual breaks.
While the theatres might be winding down in July and August, the streets are filling up.
But while the theatres might be winding down in July and August, the streets are filling up. Berlin, brimming with a new vitality, overflows into public spaces – and theatre, too, makes its way beyond its usual haunts. Berlin sends its talent to Edinburgh Fringe Festival (Wenches), to Avignon (Thomas Ostermeier), to Hamburg’s Kampnagel (Florentina Holzinger), to the Venice Biennale.
Some of Berlin’s performers venture onto the stage under the sky, such as for the classical repertoire at Berlin’s Globe Theatre or the rotating performances at Tempelhofer Feld. And, of course, in the summer there are a plethora of international performers whose destination is Berlin. August, of course, is for Tanz im August, Berlin’s biggest dance festival, which this year will feature the Brazilian Lia Rodrigues’s Companhia de Danças and the Korea National Contemporary Dance Company among its headliners.
I wanted to get a handle on the summer scene from some of the people on the inside. I reached out to a longtime Berlin dramaturg, curator and festival organiser who’s now working on a summer theatre festival with Berlin talent in another German city. What was she looking for in a festival? Of course, there was the access to international performers who might typically perform elsewhere, but she also pointed out that festivals offer an “opportunity to deepen engagement with a particular subject and see different artistic approaches alongside each other”.
She credited festivals as a real developmental opportunity for not only the artists on stage but also, drawing on her experiences, for people interested in the arts. Additionally, there are often programmes set up for students or children at summer festivals, making performing arts accessible to many who might not see theatre the rest of the year. (For example, kids under 14 can go to many Tanz im August shows for just €5.)
I was totally sold on the festival organiser’s festival propaganda. But I also wanted to know: what is it like for the artists bringing their arts to festival audiences? To try to get a handle on their perspective, I spoke with Schaubühne regular Yana Eva Thönnes, who is set to premiere her Call Me Paris, a haunting exploration of the Paris Hilton sextape scandal and the nonconsensual circulation of a recording of a German teenager in Bergisch Gladbach at the Venice Biennale, before bringing it to the Charlottenburg theatre in the fall.
Having been invited by Willem Dafoe to the Biennale, Thönnes was excited. But she also noted that the rhythms of a summer debut are strange. She broke the process down into steps – an internal dress rehearsal at the Schaubühne, where she said she already felt a “pre-premiere-ish vibe” even though “it’s not ready yet, and it was also not a premiere”.
The next step was the week in Venice and the June 1 premiere. And, finally, in October, “we’re coming back to the Schaubühne. We need to have, like, a third premiere”. This feels really different, she explains. “Usually, you have a condensed time of rehearsals,” says Thönnes, “then you just go bring it to the premiere”.
Furthermore, to tour means that you have to adapt to new stages. For Call Me Paris, it makes a big difference. At the Schaubühne, the piece will be shown in the theatre’s Globe auditorium, where, “you are always very close to the actors,” says Thönnes. She adds that even from the balcony in the Globe, you get a sense of the stage as a kind of overview, which fits the piece, because it’s “an anatomical [work] where it dissects the time of the noughties”.
The audience can see an overview of the scene as the protagonist herself tries to piece together what really happened. However, Teatro Piccolo Arsenale, where Call Me Paris will have its Venice premiere, offers only a traditional “frontal” perspective. “I cannot say what that will do to the show,” Thönnes notes. “I am very interested in finding that out.”
Indeed, a summer festival is an opportunity for everyone – organisers, directors, actors and audience –to find out how new performances in new contexts take shape. It’s a true delight in what might otherwise be a lazy time for the theatres – but certainly not for the indefatigable theatre and dance makers, who continue to beguile us.
