The title doesn’t sound like it should become the annual motto: “No Future.” What seems depressing at first is an allusion to the punk attitude of the 1970s and the song of the same name Sex Pistols. Times are looking bad, is that a reason to give up? This question can be read from this. How should one approach a future that seems so blocked by wars and the climate crisis? The Augsburg Brecht Festival 2024 is intended to provide at least a few answers, this time with the title “No Future” and taking place from February 23rd to March 3rd. Festival director Julian Warner chose the Oberhausen district as the venue.
“The festival is a multifaceted training that confronts the impending futurelessness with all the means that art, sport and pop have to offer,” is how this year’s edition is announced. In fact, it says “Sport”: So there will be a surprising mix again, just like the first festival edition that Warner curated. In 2023 he moved the Brecht Festival to the working-class district of Lechhausen and, among other things, had the city’s problems fought out at a large wrestling event. Warner’s concept was well received; not only high culture had a place at the annual festival with which Augsburg commemorates his son Bertolt Brecht. Warner worked on a small scale, involved the local communities, discovered places such as the center of the Alevi community or a traditional costume club house, and marched with a parade from the city center across the Lech.
Julian Warner is the current director of the Brecht Festival, and he curates three editions in total.
(Photo: Julius Ertelt)
It should work in a similar way in 2024, this time in Oberhausen. The festival has also found an idiosyncratic center here, a former textile factory opposite the Plärrer site. “Brecht’s Strength Club” is to move in there, “a place for physical exercises and discussions, for muscle building and controversies.” The program in the strength club consists of “participatory training, shows, readings, performances, workshops, film installations, club nights, conversations and a live radio show”, and there is also a bar and food from the local gastro scene there.
The Brecht Festival opens on February 23rd in a comparatively traditional manner, namely with David Ortmann’s production of Brecht’s “Mother Courage and Her Children” at the Augsburg State Theater. With “The Caucasian Chalk Circle” another Brecht piece can be seen at the end of the festival, here in a version by Helgard Haug from the collective “Rimini Protocol” with the Theater Hora (2nd and 3rd March). The program begins on February 24th in the strength club with a gymnastics festival, later followed by other sports such as boxing, table tennis, skateboarding, yoga, and those who come can often take an active part. The gymnastics festival is intended to represent “a rebellion against the course of history into a hopeless future and a blind belief in progress” with “power, excitement and momentum”. Warner combines the physical with a speech by the philosopher Eva von Redecker, greetings from three religions and a club night.
Deep thoughts alongside integrative action – this approach remains the same for the rest of the festival. There comes the cultural scientist Diedrich Diederichsen as well as the skateboard club “Razed”, the Russian director Anastasia Patlay, currently an Artist at Risk scholarship holder from the Brecht House, who is staging her piece “Memoria”; There is also a Brecht night with post-punk.