Munich: “Panzer Wiese” in the Schwere Reiter – Munich

On April 30, 1945, US troops entered Munich. There was a final battle in the north of the city on the Panzerwiese, the Germans used anti-aircraft guns and the ground was partly mined. After the Second World War, tanks were still driving on the approximately 200 hectare heathland, this time for military training purposes. In 1994, the city of Munich bought the site, originally intended as building land. This only partially became something, today the Panzerwiese, together with the Hartelholz, is under nature protection in order to preserve, among other things, “the nationally important communities of grass heaths, sparse oak-pine forests, warmth-loving forest edges and forest clearings with their typical, rare or endangered plant and animal species “to preserve, promote and network their habitat”. What a place up there in the north of Munich!

The “Network of Munich Theater Copywriters” (NMT) must have seen things in a similar way. They have dedicated an entire theater evening to the heathland. It’s called “Panzer Wiese” and its premiere is on November 8th at the Schwer Reiter. The director is Verena Regensburger, who began her career in the Munich theater landscape and is now, among other things, the artistic director of the Freie Bühne Munich. So there is a lot of Munich in this evening – but above all: a lot of nature.

Nature should be the protagonist of an evening at the theater, says Regensburger. The NMT, which receives three-year option funding of almost 100,000 euros from the city of Munich, started with this basic idea and developed it further, choosing a natural spot in Munich that would be suitable for this. And the network looked for a director who fits the project – Regensburger. The authors Katrin Diehl, Jan Geiger, Denijen Pauljević, Theresa Seraphin and Rinus Silzl as well as the director started work a year ago.

Anyone who has ever written a text together with someone else knows that such collective work is not necessarily easy. A year later, the text now comprises almost 40 pages and is the essence of many things: five discussions with the Panzerwiese. From five literary drafts for this evening, from many work meetings, from layering, adding, merging and leaving out a lot. There are lyrical passages, dialogues, epic passages. “Panzer Wiese” is multi-sound, but also a coherent composition.

The authors approach the place from different perspectives. So there are the crows who look from above at the heath, which is their place of life, breeding ground and provider. An allergy sufferer appears, seeking shelter behind her pollen screen high above the heath. History is integrated into a curious dialogue about how best to get through this nature reserve and whether something could go up there. Trees, endangered animals like toads and barren grasshoppers, people, they all have voices in this game.

Open detailed view

What Regensburger doesn’t want to do is depict nature realistically on stage. In other words: There will be no meadow or toads realistically imitated by actors, that would contradict the text. Regensburger takes the path of reduction, “beneficial for the text”. And it relies on abstraction and exaggeration. There is a barren stage landscape by Marie Häusner, which consists of stretched canvas, live music by Azhar Syed and the performers Noemi Clerc, Maj-Britt Klenke and Dita Scholl. The three are very different in their ways, says the director.

“I like to call my projects experimental spaces,” says Regensburger. And in fact, a lot of it sounds like a process-based approach, which is inherent in this special, collective topic development. What this experiment, this nature theater trip looks like will soon become apparent. It should last about an hour. “The text is so rich and demands so much from the audience,” says Regensburger. That’s why she didn’t want to overload the “Panzer Wiese”, which was already so full of stories.

Tank meadowNovember 8th and 9th, 7 p.m., Heavy Riders, www.geschereireiter.de