They meet Chalil on the street in Tel Aviv. Prodded by Jürgen Kuttner and Tom Kühnel, the two directors of the Augsburg Brecht Festival, the Israeli theater maker Yotam Gotal picked up Brecht’s “Reader for City Dwellers” and took to the streets with it. He and his team approached passers-by, read texts from Brecht’s collection to the willing among them and hoped for reactions. There they meet Chalil, who is hesitant at first, but then very quickly gets enthusiastic about the venture and can now be seen in the film “The Desert A City”, which Gotal shot with Nitay Dagan and which will be shown at the Brecht Festival.
“World Wide Brecht” – Kuttner and Kühnel had to explore the possibilities of this label last year when their festival edition could only be presented purely digitally due to the epidemic. While their first jointly curated edition of the festival shortly before the outbreak of the pandemic was still a big, turbulent, exuberant celebration, the following one, in 2021, offered an unimagined opportunity: If everything is digital, you suddenly have viewers worldwide – Everything that was digitally produced in 2021 and 2022 should also be archived on its own website, this year’s contributions are currently online for two months. A year ago, many of the contributions were extremely exciting, this year Kuttner and Kühnel made similar inquiries again because there was hardly any planning security and certainly no travel security for international groups. It’s just a pity that they were denied the big party to say goodbye this year.
Inspired by Brecht’s words, Chalil, an Arab who works for Tel Aviv’s social service, now tells how he fears for his little house, which his neighbor, a Jew from France, wants to steal from him. He also talks about the hardships of everyday life, and Gotal and his team set out to re-shoot it all in 48 hours. They show Khalil the result, he is very satisfied and for Gotal “he is a king”.
Brecht is received internationally – and associated with different realities of life
The Middle Eastern variation on a theme by Brecht will be shown together with three other contributions in the Textile Museum. Some of the makers are present in Augsburg and comment, others are switched on. After more than three hours, your head is spinning, but it is more important to experience that Brecht is received internationally and that this reception is linked to the realities of life. Even banal ones, like at Truman University in Missouri, where you attend a workshop whose participants argue profoundly about this Brecht and also the meaningfulness of dealing with him. Meanwhile, Soumyabrata Choudhury, a professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, is making an art film about migrant workers in India, millions of whom have been stuck far from their home villages in lockdown. He takes on Brecht’s “Flight to the Ocean”, the radio piece that openly announces the fascination of technical possibilities, lets trains and birds speak, shown only with two hands. The fact that Choudhury is present in person does not take away any of the mysteriousness of his poetic film. Very different, very concrete: the fate of the women who made theater together in Herat in Afghanistan and now live underground. The Simorgh Theater’s “The Fifth Wheel” is harrowing.
There is a live guest performance from Togo, “Mother Courage”, staged by Ramsès Bawibadi Alfa. He works in Europe and in Lomé, where he developed this world premiere with eight performers, which can now be seen in an export version in German and French, in Lomé it will be seen as a festival in the open air and with many puppets whose transport is now unfortunately it was too expensive. The performance, backed up with a lot of African music, tells of village life, but also of Brecht as a whole. Colonial history and the present against the background of the Thirty Years’ War form a dazzling, and also somewhat laborious, panopticon.