What worlds make stories, what stories make worlds? -The multiple worlds spawned by Theater der Welt 2023

What worlds make stories, what stories make worlds?

-The multiple worlds spawned by Theater der Welt 2023

 

“It matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with… It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories.”
-Donna Haraway, Staying with Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene

Since it was founded in 1981, Theater der Welt has become one of the most important theater festivals not only in Germany, but also in Europe. As a triennial that takes place in different German cities each time, the festival aims to discover the state of the art in theater from around the world. Although the spirit of pioneership has always been at the heart of the festival, it would not be an exaggeration to say that the 2023 edition is the boldest step it has ever taken in its 40-year history: for the first time it has launched an international open-call selection process and appointed its first non-European Program Director, Chiaki Soma. This radical change implies the urgent need, shared by the European theater scene, to fundamentally rethink the notion of theater and its role beyond the borders of Europe, in the face of the global crises of which the pandemic has made us acutely aware. And indeed, Theater der Welt 2023 has proven why such an undertaking is not only valuable, but necessary, if the festival is to truly fulfill the vocation of its title: to explore other worlds through theater. As a performing arts producer and researcher currently based in Germany, I had the opportunity to closely follow the festival’s program and witness the emergence of multiple worlds over the course of the festival in Frankfurt and Offenbach. 

Worlds in their Plurality

According to feminist philosopher Donna Haraway, “it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with.” For me, this is a phrase that succinctly captures the essence of curatorship: how we present an artwork is as important as the content of the work itself. Chiaki Soma had made it clear from the beginning that she wanted to create a festival of plural worlds—she had even tried to rename the festival “Theater der Welten”, which in English would mean “Theater of the Worlds” in the plural. What this implied was that no matter how diverse the individual narratives collected from different parts of the world, as long as the festival continues to tell the story of a unified, single world, there is an inherent limitation to imagining worlds beyond mine. The festival must tell the story of a place where different worlds can coexist. This shift in the premise meant that there could be different worlds—not just different countries, but different worlds of humans, animals, plants, cyborgs, puppets, or even spirits—that operate by rules and values completely different from ours. This curatorial framework was an invitation to the audience to encounter and explore some of the most bizarre and unfamiliar terrains with the openness and curiosity required when entering another world.

The most lucid examples were the two works presented at the festival by the Japanese director Satoko Ichihara, The Bacchae and Yoroboshi. While both works undoubtedly problematize the patriarchal system of our society, in which women, children, and animals are marginalized, sexualized, and objectified, Ichihara goes a step further. The works fearlessly break the taboos of what can be represented on stage—from grilled penises to massage parlors run by cyborg puppets—rendering our usual cognitive scheme and moral rules meaningless and defective to the extent that it is no longer possible for the audience to apply their standards of right and wrong to what is happening on stage. The dichotomy between men and women, humans and animals, organic bodies and inorganic bodies becomes increasingly blurred, making the judgment of the audience nothing more than a judgment made from a merely human perspective. On this slippery, uncertain ground, Ichihara invites the audience to join her radical imagination of what other worlds might exist out there beyond the one we know. This process is by no means easy or comfortable. Encountering these worlds that destabilize one’s own ground seems to have been unsettling even for regular theatergoers, as some German press reviews have problematized the work from the perspective of veganism or a more “familiar” version of feminism. I believe, however, that the true significance of Ichihara’s works lies in the fact that they go beyond criticizing the known problems of this world and prompt us to imagine, however disturbingly, how there can be worlds that can operate with profoundly different logic. 

Ways to empathize with different worlds

As much as how we tell the story of other worlds was considered an important question at Theater der Welt 2023, it was also important to experiment with how we understand and empathize with these stories. Soma included several works in the program that adopted various art forms and media to explore a different theatrical experience. The use of VR, animation, or even acupuncture could all be seen as experiments in different ways of telling about and listening to other worlds. For example, Thai film director Apichatpong Weerasethakul presented his first VR work, A Conversation with the Sun, and Japanese artist Meiro Koizumi continued the journey into VR with his Prometheus trilogy. These works open up a new horizon in the very functioning of a theatrical experience. In these “virtual worlds,” we transcend the temporal and spatial dimensions of reality and enter what could be a primordial form of this earth or become part of the butterfly colony in the deep forest. The wonder of these works lies not in the spectacle that the technological advancement shows us, but in how the works fundamentally change the way we perceive the world and empathize with our surroundings. In these worlds, the dreams of strangers are shared as mine, the sufferings of others are mourned together, fellow audiences become companions in the collective journey to emancipation, and the earth is perceived as a fragile shimmer of light that we must tend with care. Although these moments of experiencing different ways of relating and empathizing could feel esoteric or obscure, they urge us to imagine new ethics between humans and more than human beings, and sow the seeds of a different world-making.

Experiments using various artistic media to explore different ways of relating to and empathizing with multiple worlds continued at the Museum of Applied Arts in Frankfurt. Several performance and installation works, including Performing Acupuncture by Japanese artist Aya Momose, Palu Ángel Taizōkai by London/Berlin-based collective Keiken, and Echo’s Chamber by Dutch collective BVDS’s, challenge the ways in which we empathize with others. Escaping the self-centered, ocular-centric, linguistic modes of relating to others, these works fundamentally blur the boundary between the self and the outside world, by using the sense of touch, intuitive sensitization, and fluid emotional relay to suggest that there are other ways to build and share relationships. As Lisa Berins of the Frankfurter Rundschau noted, “The six collectives and artists [Soma] has invited to the museum have obviously been selected for their ability to create new, sensual experiences that question our own physical determinism,” thus exploring the possibility of crossing emotional and spiritual boundaries. As such, the festival transcended the boundaries of the theatrical form by incorporating various media into the program to conjure alternative bodily experiences of relating, empathizing, and caring that traditional forms of theater could not create. 

Incubation as nurturing the tipping point for change

It is important to note that all of these experiments gain a complex and enriching strength through a solid curatorial backbone, namely the concept of “incubationism.” Incubationism is a neologism coined by Chiaki Soma and Kyoko Iwaki to rethink the temporality of suspension not as an obstacle, but as a necessary pause in order to nurture, reflect, and brood new lives and thus new worlds. According to the curatorial team, the period of the pandemic was a painful time for everyone, but also an opportunity to pause the ever-accelerating temporality of progress and advancement on which our capitalist society is based. The period of incubation, liminality, and dreaming allows us to nurse our wounds and nourish ourselves to make the necessary push toward a tipping point for change. It is like going into hibernation to emerge into a different world. The framework of incubationism allowed the audience to perceive the artworks in the festival as caring, attentive, speculative moves toward imagining how this world could be otherwise; they were experimental, but not boastful of their innovativeness; they were different, but not trapped in an obsession with the new; they envisioned the future, but not preoccupied with the ideology of progress; they were healing, but not to get back to work, but to gain the courage to step into unknown worlds.

Resonances of the festival

I believe that the framework of incubationism and the plurality of the worlds that the works of Theater der Welt 2023 have unfolded left a distinctive mark on the European theater scene. Performing arts scholar Bojana Kunst comments that the curatorial framework provided a pertinent lens through which to view the works and succeeded in convincing the audience why such an artistic encounter is important today. Commenting on the impact of this festival on the European theater scene, Egbert Tholl of the Süddeutsche Zeitung noted that Soma’s Asian productions offered “the greatest possible contrast to Central European theater. […] Soma wants to bring opposites together, nature and its absence, the virtual and the analog, dreams and reality, Frankfurt and the neighboring city of Offenbach. […] A festival like Theater der Welt may not necessarily show where German municipal theater could or should develop. But it does open windows into other worlds of perception,” and some of the programs, such as Ho Tzu Nyen’s Night March of Hundred Monsters, are the kind of work that Germany urgently needs. It is also worth noting the far-reaching repercussions of the program. The students who participated in the Festival Academy program recalled how each performance sparked reactions not only about the work itself, but always expanded into passionate discussions about numerous social issues such as the role of art, women’s rights, environmentalism, and anthropocentrism that touch every corner of our daily lives. As such, the artworks became mediators for them to see, think, and talk differently about our world—or worlds. 

 

A unique story that tells the story of others

While pondering the significance of Theater der Welt in the current European festival scene, I came across this fascinating press commentary: 

In mostly experimental arrangements, [the festival] focuses on the foreign and the unknown, in people and before their eyes. In a Western world that is increasingly characterized by isolation and hatred, this theater can still teach us a lot—above all, a more open approach to fears.

Having followed European festivals and artworks over the past few years, I cannot help but notice a certain paradox that is often found in the Western art scene. The current programs of theaters and festivals are very conscious of promoting diversity, but the diversity that is promoted is often consolidated into forms that are easily recognizable, coagulated into categories of identity or simple moral schemes where it is easy to take a position—friends or enemies, correct or wrong. Messages are formed in words that we would like to gladly hear or simply reject, without having to confront our fears or engage in the cumbersome task of resolving antagonisms with others. In this sense, no matter how diverse the narratives may be, they are mostly told through the story of a monolith.

Theater der Welt 2023 felt like an idiosyncratic voice in the European theater scene—a different story that tells the story of others—in the sense that it not only suggested that multiple worlds can coexist, but also was courageous enough to show how uncomfortable it is to really tread into those worlds of difference. After all, the underlying force of all minority struggles—whether postcolonial, feminist, environmentalist, or other—is to question the current system, to destabilize the operation of categorization, and to resist easy solutions. It involves curiosity about the unknown and embracing our fears. As many of the works in the festival showed, encountering another world that operates by a completely unfamiliar set of rules can be disorienting and unsettling. The liminal ground of incubation is by no means a clean, uncontaminated, or purified terrain. It is fertile precisely because it is entangled with complexity, contaminated with the unknown, and brimming with potentials we have not yet experienced. It is in this dreamlike space that we recuperate from damage, reflect on the troubles, and find the moment to imagine how to build this world anew. As Theater der Welt 2023 has shown us, perhaps the task of today’s art world would be, to quote Haraway once more, “to make trouble, to stir up potent response to devastating events, as well as to settle troubled waters and rebuild quiet places.”

 

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