Overpowering directors: problematic. But is the counter-model, the allegedly hierarchy-free theater of the Berliner Volksbühne, more than just a phrase?
Finally a theater puts an end to the one-man dictatorship of an overpowering artistic director! The Berliner Volksbühne, hip, woke, feminist and anti-authoritarian anyway, does away with the artistic patriarchy. At least that is what their director René Pollesch says. Who wants to see all enslaved, exploited, oppressed and unlawful beings on stage? And German theaters are teeming with them, at least if you believe the widespread story of the sole rule of the artistic directors and the theaters as the last feudal principalities. Both the description of the problem of the artistic director’s power and Pollesch’s supposed solution to the problem, however, are bursting with fuzziness and ideologization.