Content area
Full Text
Nationaltheater Reinickendorf (NTR) is the sixth production in Vegard Vinge and Ida Müller's ongoing Ibsen-Saga (2006–). The Saga is a series of interconnected performances that spin tapestries of associative references out of Henrik Ibsen's plays, resulting in durational dramas whose citations range from the operas of Puccini to the films of Scorsese. The content and length, which change nightly, cohere through themes of aspiration pitted against stultifying dogma. Vinge/Müller's overtly artificial aesthetic unifies the seemingly disparate sources into a stylized universe of dovetailing grand narratives. Like prior installments, NTR mined Ibsen's romantic motif of youth battling convention; however, it dramatized this theme as institutional practice. Building a "national theatre" that embodied the creative idealism of its repertory, NTR contested the bureaucracy of European state-theatres. NTR, serendipitously, premiered the very night that the ousted director of Berlin's Volksbühne, Frank Castorf, gave his farewell performance. Castorf's politicized aesthetics and German-language repertory were replaced with a curatorial model headed by Belgian art historian Chris Dercon. Unionists and artists alike protested Dercon's appointment, fearing that he would reshape the Volksbühne into another characterless pit-stop on the international touring circuit. Against this backdrop, Vinge/Müller's juxtaposition of idealists and bureaucrats warring over the fate of an institution was timely and audacious.
In addition to Castorf's Volksbühne, NTR drew on two of Germany's most utopian theatres: the spiritual destination of Wagner's Bayreuth Festspiele, and the formalism of Oskar Schlemmer's Total Theatre. Both understood institutional practice and architecture as extensions of artistic content. For Vinge/Müller, the result was a 120-seat theatre nestled inside a World...