With a little courage, one could step in. Could prevent Wozzeck from killing Marie. The somewhat hesitant Filippo Bettoschi and the stunning Margrethe Fredheim fight the final relationship clinch at eye level. At eye level with the audience. You stand on a traverse leading dramatically diagonally through the room, at a very lofty height above the stage. But just at the height at which the viewer sits, on the side, but not on the edge, but in the middle.
At the Staatstheater Kassel you have a choice. Either you take a seat in the stalls and look, as you always do, from below at what is being played up there. Or you can choose a place in the “Pandaemonium”. Then you still watch the performance, but you sit in it. In the action, somewhere in the spectacular, multi-storey steel rods with which Sebastian Hannak filled the stage space, the side stages and the back stage, protruding around the portal and also a bit into the “normal” auditorium. Beneath one, on the slightly terraced floor of the stage, sits the Kassel State Orchestra, fanned out, and Francesco Angelico conducts it with poetry never before experienced in this piece. Alban Berg’s “Wozzeck”, per se already a cry for humanity, becomes a completely new experience here, because you sit in the sound that fills the space, because you can really locate every single instrument and you can experience immediately what it is The work of a large orchestra is always: an overall result produced by many individuals.
And that brings you to the core of what Florian Lutz, the new director at the Staatstheater Kassel and director of this “Wozzeck”, its opening premiere, is up to here. With this pandaemonium, a space stage with the help of which the reception of musical theater can be turned inside out.
The moment of representation has had its day here. It is replaced by a shared experience for all viewers
When the European theater was invented, around 30,000 people lived in Athens and 15,000 fit into the theater in Epidaurus, they sat in a semicircle around the orchestra, i.e. the playing area. The theater was a forum for public discussion, politics and religion, which was important in Attic democracy, was negotiated here. Many centuries later, the temples of art that still stand today were built. You step up to art, houses like the Vienna Burgtheater or the Paris Opera boast enormous stairwells, compared to which the stage looks almost tiny. The bourgeoisie, which has learned from the nobility and the court theater, is delighted with its own display, the simple people take their place in the gallery at the top, the art is carefully presented on the stage in front of it, in a mixture of educational and secular tasks Consecration.
Not much has changed about that. Even those theaters and opera houses that were built in Germany after the Second World War and did not imitate the old spatial arrangement with the tiers and galleries ultimately retained the strict separation: up there people make art, down there you can also find a culturally inspired one if necessary Take a nap. This also applies to theaters like in Bayreuth, Frankfurt or Bochum, which have no tiers but a continuously increasing auditorium. There, too, one can perceive one’s cultural heritage undisturbed by the events.
Florian Lutz is not the only theater maker that worries. In the independent scene, work has long been more fluid, at the Stadttheater, for example, Benedikt von Peter began years ago in Bremen to at least scratch the strict separation between auditorium and stage, then tightened this procedure in Lucerne and now in Basel, where he also created the foyer for declared public space during the day. As early as 2003, Claus Guth had the auditorium in Munich’s Gärtnerplatztheater covered, played in the stalls, the audience sat in the stands, right in the middle of the performance of Awet Terterjan’s “Das Beben”. In the case of more delicate attempts to increase the experience of a performance, for example, a walkway is built into the stalls. Or you go, like the Ruhrtriennale, in industrial halls, but then usually put a conventional grandstand in them.
The “Pandaemonium” in Kassel consists of 60 tons of steel framework and enables a completely new opera experience.
(Photo: Nils Klinger)
Lutz wanted and wants more, which is why the political decision-makers deliberately brought him in. In the past few years he was artistic director in Halle, where he consistently alternated between spatial stage solutions, similar to what is now in Kassel, and traditional peep box theater. In Kassel, the Pandaemonium, consisting of 60 tons of steel scaffolding, will remain in place until at least the beginning of next year. The decision for this was also fueled by the – now outdated? – Corona restrictions. With Pandaemonium and half-full parquet, Lutz brings almost as many spectators into the house as with normal full occupancy; the orchestra has space on the stage even with a large cast.
The decisive aspect of the spatial stage is a social one. For Lutz it certainly played a role in Halle to counter the election successes of the AfD with a new community model in the theater. In his Kassel production of “Wozzeck” there is actually, if you will, a recourse to Epidaurus. Arnold Bezuyen, the captain’s cunning singer, also acts as a moderator, conducts votes with the audience and asks them about their political agenda. The performance then stops for a moment, or, as in melodrama, the orchestral music continues underneath. The votes can be followed on various video screens, which are also necessary in order to follow the events filmed live when they are taking place in places that cannot be seen directly.
Wozzeck works as a parcel driver, Marie lives in a white trash booth, the drum major, the stunning Frederick Ballentine, is a show-off with a gold chain. Lutz stages the characters’ encounters with great immediacy, only the two pub scenes on the front stage smear a bit, but they are often problematic. Above all, you never see the art result alone, you can also see its production, you can watch singers putting on make-up or even catch a private moment before the next scene.
The moment of representation has had its day here. It is replaced by an experience, a shared experience of all viewers, among which the differences in rank (to be taken literally) are canceled. It’s exciting, exciting, the future. The composer and conductor Pierre Boulez once recommended that the opera houses be blown up. You don’t have to. You can also just turn it inside out.