Why did it have to be autumn now? At the end of June, Art Minister Bernd Sibler announced that this summer, under the motto “Bavaria is playing”, theater, music and even culture could take place everywhere outside. People are very open and give money, after all, art needs a substitute for the months of being locked up. This outside also implicitly meant the English Garden.
If a minister says something like that, he should be taken seriously, which Till Hofmann did and started planning a theater festival on the last weekend in August. In the English garden. International. But now two months in advance for such a project are not exactly lush, Corona still restricts travel, and finally there is the Bavarian Palace and Lake Administration. In 1789, Elector Karl Theodor donated the English Garden to the citizens of Munich; today the authority affiliated with the Ministry of Finance says what can and cannot happen there.
Putting a stage in the middle of the meadow is a horror for the castle and lake administrators, but they didn’t stay as bulky as one had to fear. And so the festival “375 hectares” took place this weekend – the name refers to the size of the English Garden. Of the 375 hectares, only a few square meters on the edge of the garden could be used, but this process has to be thought of as an initiation. In the coming year you can push from the edge to the inside, because even what was possible this year in the cold, rain and only in somewhat hidden places was a promise. And the rain almost didn’t matter.
The Eulenspiegelei on the stage next to the Seestadl sloshes elegantly into today
The TamS, for example, plays on a stage next to the Seestadl, a little too hidden to get a lot of walk-in customers, but still clearly visible enough. “Till Eulenspiegel”, staged by Lorenz Seib, can be played there in front of many more people with all of its crazy poetry than is currently possible in TamS. And people come, greed, hold out in the cold, are happy. Leo Gmelch musically supports the story told and played by four incredibly lively performers, the Eulenspiegelei spills elegantly into today, what is the truth if it is easier to invent and believe than it can get to the bottom of it. The four on stage create 100 characters in no time at all, it’s a great, clever pleasure.
At all venues you are carefully guided and guided by the friendliest staff, you sit at the seat, you take off your mask. Then on the way to the Haus der Kunst, music echoes from the other side of the lake, it comes from the park of the Catholic Academy, which is played just as well as the garden of the Seidlvilla or a stage at the Rumfordschlössl. This is how it has to be in the future, just a lot more that can be discovered in casual curiosity. On the terrace of the Haus der Kunst there is great DJ music to be heard, people sit, get up, put on masks to dance and you wonder why that wasn’t possible much earlier – then you would have the nightly excesses in the Türkenstrasse and Schellingstrasse dammed. The next day Sophia Kennedy will play her hypnotic songs there, and Caitlin van der Maas will give an outlook on her piece with a stunningly charming reading, which will be released on October 7th in the Schwere Reiter. And in the afternoon you can stop by Pepe Arts; the Munich Cirque Nouveau troupe amazes with unbelievable physical tricks, only what they want to tell with them – being an artist in lockdown – there is still room for improvement. Here, at the soccer field in the southeast corner of the garden, people stop, onlookers, for whom the coffee in the mug is getting cold. Because they are watching, mesmerized.