Theater: The Art of Appropriation

The theater as an institution has a class problem – in three ways,” says Ahmed Shah from Theater X at a panel on art and class struggle in the foyer of the Berliner Volksbühne. It is made by the middle class for the middle class and tells a story about the middle class. The community theater “Theater X”, located in Berlin-Moabit, has set itself the task of shaking up precisely these conditions. The cultural wealth of Berlin is only accessible to a small part of society; people from the “margins”, especially migrant young people from working-class families, are usually excluded from it. “We can’t wait until we are given a place. We have to take it ourselves.”

This year’s edition of the Festiwalla organized by Theater Despite existing political differences, for example with regard to Israel/Palestine positioning, Festiwalla has made its way into one of Berlin’s largest theaters and is practicing practical appropriation: the festival audience strolls through the corridors in a good mood, and posters about global labor disputes are plastered in the foyer , workshops and parties take place, all organized and supported by a mostly volunteer team. “The Volksbühne was built by workers through membership fees and we, the working class, are taking it back today and showing how culture can work differently,” says Ahmed Shah.

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But what exactly can that look like? What stories are told on stage about the topic of class struggle, which is often associated with a dusty aftertaste? And in what way? One answer is: with the entire variety of theatrical means. Festiwalla’s program includes, among other things, a street protest opera about Big Tech and the sell-out of the city (Der-Turm-Stürzt-Ein-Kollektiv/Lauratibor); a cabaret evening about the German defense company Rheinmetall (SKET); a performative city walk through the formerly red working-class district of Wedding and a dance piece by the Nigerian Illuminate Theater that poetically tells of war, flight and exclusion.

Despite the variety of means, it also becomes clear that the theatrical representations of struggle and resistance often tend to take the form of an accusation by a closed group. “We want to cover ‘those up there’ with scorn and ridicule,” sings a character from SKET. “We are who we are,” say the Nigerian dancers in the choir, while the actors in the protest opera certainly do so in a ceremonial act defeat the seductive personification of an AI.

The musical theater production “J. From the Block” by NeXt Generation with its rewriting of Brecht’s “Saint Joan of the Slaughterhouses”. J. is an activist and content creator for the supposedly public good app GottaTreat. The new workers in the slaughterhouses are the exploited riders of the delivery company Paviando and their colleagues in the dark aisles of the department stores. As a migrant from Turkey, the CEO is proud of the company she has built and sings to the dissatisfied riders at every opportunity that she is one of them. She usually sits on a home trainer and encourages her employees to be more productive or tries by all means possible to prevent a works council from being founded. J. fluctuates between concern, self-improvement activism and real solidarity and ends up losing his job. «J. From The Block» shows the complexity of today’s labor disputes in times of flat hierarchies, digital start-ups and windy subcontractors and brings Brecht into the present with pop music and humor.

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