Berlin Theater Meeting: Luisa Neubauer: Art, Climate, Catastrophe

Unpleasant memories come back: It’s a bit like back in the noughties when – the reasons are hidden today, but that’s how it was done – people went to poetry slams. The texts were often crude, the delivery style went beyond the laws of rhythm and meter, and there was gesticulation in the most strange way. The entirely middle-class audience thought they were witnessing something completely new. It was just a pop culture phenomenon that had emerged overseas a decade and a half earlier and was now being painstakingly imitated.

But we are no longer in the noughties. We are in the House of the Berliner Festspiele, and the Theatertreffen is celebrating its 61st edition. Luisa Neubauer was invited to the supporting program and gave a “speech in E flat major”.

Why actually? The new Theatertreffen director Nora Hertlein-Hull, who was appointed at short notice, was previously responsible for the Lessing Days at the Thalia Theater Hamburg, which traditionally open with a speech. This year Neubauer had the honor. And because occasions are interchangeable, and what has taken place once can also be given a second time, the speaker is doing in Berlin what was already effective in Hamburg. The somewhat contrived justification that Neubauer’s “Lecture Performance” enters into dialogue with the opening production of the Theatertreffen, “Nathan the Wise”, which is after all also by Lessing, hardly convinces anyone.

Unlike the poetry slams of the past, there is no bad-tempered indie pop coming from the speakers here, but instead Beethoven’s “Cavatina”. Many thanks to the Ensemble Resonance! That could be a nice balance to the hustle and bustle of the theater meeting – if the composition wasn’t used as a background foil for simpler ideas.

Luisa Neubauer, who is persistently labeled as an activist but is nevertheless a member of the governing party Alliance 90/The Greens, talks about the topic that she has made her own: the climate catastrophe. There is nothing wrong with that, the sheer sense of reality challenges the debate. But you won’t avert a climate catastrophe by plunging the interested public into an art catastrophe.

Recently, Fridays for Future, whose key figures in Germany include Neubauer, announced that they would be involved in the European election campaign through so-called “art actions”. How can you imagine that? A poster with a lettering was soon attached to a bridge. There is nothing wrong with that either. However – that may mean a little action, but it has nothing to do with art.

Now Neubauer stands in the Berlin Festival building and speaks into the music. She gesticulates crazy around (the raised index finger isn’t missing either), as if she wanted to conjure up a few spirits. From one topic to the next, from Voyager 1 and 2 to Lessing and Elon Musk. If there were no music, the Empress would be standing there naked with this alleged speech.

Neubauer oscillates between strenuous over-articulation and a relapse to sympathetic Hamburg consonant absorption. She says “bombed” and thinks it’s a German word. She jokes a little, but not so much that you actually laugh. It depicts the impending catastrophes for us, but not in such gloomy colors that one would despair. She laments the loss of faith. And in fact everything here sounds like a mixture of church meeting poetry and self-help prose. “We are everything we have, so we are everything we need.” The sentence could easily fill a calendar page.

But then she goes further: “The fact that we are now in a crisis of hope is hope itself.” One suspects that someone here has studied “Walter Benjamin for those in a hurry” in order to pass it on to the audience half-understood. The hope must not be missing – first martyrdom awaits us, then comes redemption. Neubauer’s “Speech in E flat major” lasted forty minutes. The activist arts industry remains the enemy of art.