A contagious story: How a Fritz Kater play contaminated a whole festival

The iconography is very 70s Germany, the interaction with the world is very 21^st century no-man’s-land, as if you could make reality, even at its harshest versions, go back and forth the way things go back and forth on an iPhone touchscreen.  The five characters in 5 Morgen may well point to an indefinite time, but whether it comes from the past, the future or the present— this is an impossible place to live in: the place of paranoia, the place of apocalypse, the place of disease, the place of an unstoppable contamination chain (in short: the world as an ultimately viral phenomenon).

A parade of zombies, a parade of survivors, Fritz Kater’s play was the final act of a festival built around an idea that is impossible to live with: the idea of terrorism as a perfectly established, and no longer exceptional, way of getting things done. But it was also the first of these five productions especially commissioned by the TERRORisms project to find its way to the stage — back in October 2013, as the opening performance of Armin Petras’ first season as the Schauspiel Stuttgart’s newly appointed director. In a way, it contaminated the theme festival that Armin Petras hosted in Stuttgart more than a year later — not without some public commotion —, finally getting his and the four associated productions together for a last brainstorm (Nationaltheatret Oslo’s We chew on the bones of time; Jugoslovenko dramsko pozoriste’s The Dragonslayers; Habima National Theater’s God Waits at the Station; and Comédie de Reims’ La Baraque, by order of appearance).

But how do you tell a city, how do you tell an audience, that of all the themes in the world this is the one you’ve decided to talk about? Plus, how do you tell this to a city that had been bruised by a terrorist experience itself, the Baader-Meinhof one?  “Well, that’s why they brought me all the way from Berlin [before heading the Schauspiel Stuttgart, he was the director of the Maxim-Gorki Theater there]: to shake things up around here”, Armin Petras explains a couple of minutes after 5 Morgen’s last performance. “Let’s say it was not a problem. Although the reaction of the political authorities at our announcement was not exactly ‘wow, cool, let’s go’.” The artistic team was guaranteed full freedom in its tackling of the issue — aside from some special procedures, Petras says, “We had to get in touch with the city’s police department; they gave us a phone number and told us which groups were likely to show up and what to do in case they did. They did not.” Even gags, such as the installation of a fake metal detector in the main entrance, or the appearance of a fake policewoman at the bar were allowed: “Our stage designer came up with that idea. We agreed that it was interesting to explore the different ways of dealing with the subject of terrorism, today, as artists.”

It was a learning opportunity for Armin Petras himself: “Staging the terrorist attacks makes it easier for us to live with them: suddenly we’re not alone with those problems and fears anymore, there are 500 other people in the room. For me this was the most important lesson.” The festival’s director singles out God Waits at the Station — the anatomy of a suicide bomber who blows herself up in Israel — as a demonstration that it is definitely possible to go way beyond paranoia in a theater room. “I could understand the social, economic, political and religious circumstances behind the Palestinian suicide bombers’ phenomenon. Now I can deal with it in better ways.” Maybe there’s not much more we can do, as suggested by the performance staged by the Nationaltheatret Oslo for this TERRORisms cycle while recovering from the founding trauma of the Utoya massacre, in which 69 people lost their lives at the hands of a seemingly normal Norwegian citizen, Anders Breivik. That’s the lesson to be learnt, Armin Petras insists: “Terrorrism lives with us.”

In Stuttgart, no matter how many years have gone by since the neighbouring Stammheim Trials — Stammheim being the prison where several members of the Baader-Meinhof group were found dead between 1972 and 1977 —, that statement is particularly true. The name is deeply inscribed in the city’s collective memory, and in its public space, too. But is it still alive? “Not too much”, says the director at the Schauspiel Stuttgart, who came to town more than 30 years after the Stammheim events. “Older people know about the history, but I don’t believe the younger ones do. Other issues have become more urgent: the NSA violations, salafi terrorism… That’s why I wanted this festival to be called TERRORisms, in the plural form. But of course it is peculiar to organize such a festival in a city where there’s a metro line going to Stammheim. I knew the word from the movies Fassbinder had made in the 70s, but I only realized how close it is to Stuttgart when I first came here.”

Perspectives

Like a self-fulfilling prophecy, a terrorist attack in the Tunisian resort of Sousse — 38 victims, mostly Europeans — interrupted the festival from a distance. “That’s how it has been since the beginning of this process: while we were writing these plays, while we were rehearsing them, hundreds, thousands of people died in terrorist attacks. There’s a growing number of such attacks, so, unfortunately, the occurrence of the Sousse events right in the middle of the festival was not a big surprise”, says Armin Petras. But was that the reason why spectators didn’t want to come and face — inside a theatre room — the same lousy show they’re confronted with day after day in every newscast?  “Different reasons explain why the festival was not that crowded: it’s summer, the topic is difficult and tough, and, generally speaking, Southern Germans prefer to have fun when they have some free time. But I’m not bitter or angry about that. We proposed a very intense schedule, and the city’s just not that big.”

As far as 5 Morgen is concerned, the city was big enough. “The reviews weren’t too good, but still we showed the performance 27 times in four different countries, and it became a success. A lot of the shows were sold out, despite the fact that we chose a secondary stage far from the city center in a not so lively neighbourhood.” Armin Petras witnessed as the performance grew and changed in the course of these past two years: “In Oslo, people laughed up until ten minutes before the end; in Sibiu, it was the opposite. In Stuttgart, it was a mixture of both. And I heard people say, ‘They’re so good with their bodies’. Because here nobody works with the body, people work only with their laptop and their mouse.”

It’s a matter of perspective. So were the five plays that the festival assembled: “Both the Norwegian show and the German show illustrate how our lack of faith in God and ourselves constitutes a problem for the western society. The Serbian show illustrates how terrorism is a 500-year-old battle. The Israeli show illustrates that there are places in the world where people are so close to one another but at the same time have so many conflicting purposes that terrorism must occur. These kids who volunteer for the terrorist attacks have no work, no home, no water. In the North of Africa, 45% of the male population aged between 18 and 28 years old is unemployed. A social worker from Essen stated that 95% of the volunteers leaving Germany to join the ISIS grew up without a father. For them, terrorism comes as a life project.”

It’s a terrible conclusion to come to, after five days of reflection on the topic. A conclusion, Armin Petras says, he will be considering for projects in the near future. “Theatrically, this idea of a terrorist organization becoming the father you never had is very strong. I guess I will be working on this story in one of my next shows.”

And so the contamination continues.

 

 

Published on 13 November 2015 (Article originally written in Portuguese)