Lausitz Festival: Proving its worth in production

Festival director Daniel Kühnel and managing director Maria Schulz, the Prime Minister of the Free State of Saxony Michael Kretschmer and Brandenburg’s Lausitz representative Klaus Freytag, all of them sitting on the podium agree: The Lausitz Festival will be with and, above all, for them made by people in the region.

Only the latter realizes that “capital city residents and others” could also learn something if they go to the numerous event locations, for example how briquettes are made. The capital audience, which had this year’s program presented on Monday, reacted cheerfully. And yet it sounds a bit like the culture journalists rushing past in production, far away from the late-night shopping infrastructure that is usual in Berlin. It’ll be okay, you still think.

An overarching “inspiration word” was thought of for the program. “Otherself” it says. No, this is not a Sorbian-speaking secret greeting. A neologism intended to illustrate the confrontation of each of us with the other. A bit playful, which is nice, but also very constructed, is what you think of when you hear the inspiration word. And maybe that’s something you can blame the festival organizers for.

The Lausitz Festival has been taking place since 2019, with generous subsidies. One thing or another was accompanied by some criticism right from the start. Last year, however, the protest became a little louder: the cultural flagship project featured imported art. An artistic director like Kühnel, who lives in Hamburg, could hardly curate an offer for the Lusatian population from the outside. As if to confirm these attacks, occupancy figures were presented that showed mediocre audience response.

On the podium, people seem to be careful not to question the director’s work at all; cooperation with the people in the region is constantly emphasized. And when asked whether changes had been made after the criticism last year, Kühnel replied that the region had been firmly anchored in the program from the start, but that they now wanted to communicate this even more clearly.

In the end, not only the cultural journalist from the capital will have to prove himself in Lusatia, but also this year’s festival program in the region. The “Shakespeare series” – as presenter Shelly Kupferberg put it – will continue this year. The young director Marcel Kohler stages “Othello” and expands the Elizabethan classic with “The Strangers,” the play by Shakespeare for which the authorship could only be clarified a few years ago. Kohler uses the disused Telux glass factory as a stage. This promises to be quite exciting.

Claus Peymann, who will be performing an adaptation of a “Report for an Academy” as a solo spectacle in the Kafka year, will also be performing at the same place – Kühnel’s words: “none less than the great one”. But is the retired protagonist of the West German theater avant-garde of the last century so eagerly awaited in Lusatia? That would actually be a sign of the ongoing structural change in the region. We will see.

The interdisciplinary Lausitz Festival will take place this year from August 24th to September 14th at numerous different locations in the region.

www.lausitz-festival.eu

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