Almost every project by Volker Lösch and his team of authors (Christine Lang and Ulf Schmidt) could be called “AufRuhr”, only without the capital R in the middle. Lösch sees himself as a decidedly politically intervening theater man who breaks the cozy framework of an art temple (or a classic text) in order to allow activists to have their say beyond the conventional role-play with all the topics that are burning on their nails. In Essen’s Grillo-Theater it starts with the long, narrow hall being cleared and transformed into a spatial stage, with many large screens on the four walls. Small films, video statements by young activists, videos filmed live and classic theater play combine to form a complex multimedia show, with the audience sitting on stools in the middle. The whole spectacle, with two breaks, lasts a good three hours.
In the south of Essen, the rich reside at Lake Baldeney. The north can be demolished
The title “AufRuhr” refers to the rebellion of the miners of the Ruhr area in 1920, which was suppressed by right-wing terrorists in association with the Reichswehr – a foretaste of what was to begin 13 years later. But Lösch & Co, of course, have primarily contemporary conflicts in mind. The gap between rich and poor is practically geographical in the Ruhr metropolis of Essen, the wealthy in the south, sitting in their villas on the idyllic Baldeneysee (the famous Kruppvilla Hügel is only one of them), only then come into contact with the precarious ends of houses in the north when the latter drop by for cleaning or on behalf of a delivery service. At the beginning of the evening you can see the investor van Velt (Janina Sachau) literally floating above everything in a helicopter: renovating the north? Oh well, it’s best to just tear it off and replace it with the profitable investor project “Essen 5.0”, 20,000 new apartments for 60,000 people or something. Then the vegan Van Velt bites into a carrot, crack.
Police officers against activists and alleged “left-wing fascists”: The production also plays robbers and gendarmes.
(Photo: Birgit Hupfeld)
The critical look at the situation, the purely monetary interest of the investors, the fickleness of the city leaders and the mayor Kühn (Stefan Migge), is understandable. Unfortunately, Lang, Lösch and Schmidt allow themselves to be carried away, in the creative intoxication of an exuberant fantasy, to devise a wild story that comes to a head in the third part at the latest: The “day of reckoning” has come, announces the police superintendent Reich, with increasingly difficult things Device is advancing its troops against the “left-wing fascists” – mostly young rebels who do not like the “Essen 5.0” project and who have already occupied some houses from which they are to be evacuated. An anarchist pensioner joins them, a hacker sabotages the “unprotected mail traffic” of the city government and investors, the conflict symbolically divides the family of the building contractor Haussmann (Laura Sundermann) – a popular topos of Lang, Lösch and Schmidt.
More interesting and touching than this somewhat hysterical robber-and-gendarme game are the statements of the partly very young activists leaked in the video, which can only be vaguely related to the topic of the evening, because most of the activists are concerned with saving the The world in general, but naturally about “man-made climate change” (as New Chancellor Scholz, who is not very popular here, used to say stereotypically). A thirteen-year-old thinks that thirteen is a nice starting age, twelve is still a little too young. Yes, you have to agree with the young woman.