Resistance can take many forms
- Ayşe Draz
- 9 Haz
- 16 dakikada okunur
We spoke with Annemie Vanackere, the Belgian artistic director of HAU Hebbel am Ufer since 2012, about the fragility of Berlin's independent scene’s ecosystem, institutional memory, the threats posed by the current budget crisis in Germany, and the radical relationship between performance and form
Interview: Ayşe Draz Orhon
Annemie Vanackere. Photo: Annette Hauschild
Carolina Bianchi, among the artists who has inspired and impressed me the most in recent years, was at HAU this season with The Brotherhood, the second part of her Cadela Força trilogy. I had seen the first part, A Noiva e o Boa Noite Cinderela (The Bride and Goodnight Cinderella) in Avignon, and even had hosted Bianchi on our Conversations in Ten Questions series¹. Bianchi, transforming performance into a genuine investigative tool, addresses the inequality and violence of all kinds including sexual violence, that women still face, and even increasingly today, in life as well as in the theater, and she took the stage this time with a cast consisting solely of men besides herself. Using the theater as both a crime scene and a evidence, peeling back the layers of masculine codes, this production won the Silver Lion award at the Venice Dance Biennale in 2025. An open letter² written by a group of leading female curators of the field after her performance at Kunstenfestivaldesarts also confirms that Bianchi is an incredible storyteller and that she presents the issue she addresses to the audience in all its layers with wit and without oversimplifying it. After the performance, the questions Bianchi posed, and her sharp observations continued to linger in my mind for weeks. Furthermore, in the fictional conversation she has on stage with a fictional German male director, I am sure that, as a woman working and producing in the field, we can all recognize familiar faces and situations in a universal way. Another production at HAU this season was Miet Warlop's One Song, which I had long wanted to see. It was a performance where twelve performers exhausted their bodies in an Olympic-like sporting competition around a single song, each musician grappling with an acrobatic challenge, and even if they weren't playing instruments, they repeated their cheers or "cheerleader" dances in an endless cycle. This production, where they played the song written by Warlop over and over again, with a transformation brought on by their increasing exhaustion, was created as the fourth installment in Milo Rau's NTGent Histoire(s) du Théâtre series. Learning that the work took shape after Warlop lost her brother at the age of twenty-six triggered a different approach to all that physical collapse. In an artist interview with HAU director Vanackere before the performance, Warlop also hinted at what awaits us in the Belgian pavilion at the Biennial. Warlop is currently the artist behind the Belgian pavilion at the 61st Venice Biennale, the first pavilion in the biennale's history to be entirely dedicated to performance. The IT NEVER SSST pavilion transforms into a living sculpture, filled with percussion rituals seemingly derived from One Song. In an interview with Frieze³, Warlop explains how she tries to free herself from the pressure to entertain the audience and the assumption that "every second must be a 'yes' when you're face-to-face with the audience." Among the other works and artists I saw at HAU this season, which presented some of the most exciting performances, were She She Pop, Rabih Mroué and Lina Majdalanie's Four Walls and a Roof (which I saw again), and GLITCH WITCH by Berlin-based American choreographer Meg Stuart, in which dancers over forty years old re-enact their own bodies on stage. Forced Entertainment, which holds a special place for me, arrived at HAU this season with Everything Must Go, the final piece in a loose trilogy using AI voices and lip-sync. After observing how everyday language evolves into a Dadaist poetics in Tim Etchells' texts, and how performers who lend their bodies to the sounds produced by machines remain far more human in this process, the post-performance conversation between Forced Entertainment and the Berlin-based German-British collective Gob Squad was incredibly insightful.
Berlin's performing arts ecosystem, both institutional and independent scene defined mostly as "free stage" (Freie Szene), operates structurally very differently from what we are used to in Istanbul. Whether artists present independent productions with funding or meet audiences with works included in the repertoire, they don't perform continuously throughout the season, but sometimes spread over several seasons, and sometimes as one-off performances or blocks of three or four days, depending on the funding. Venues like Schaubühne, Volksbühne, or Gorki⁴ shape their programs with their own permanent ensembles, invited directors, or guest productions, mostly operating with a repertoire logic; while some venues function solely as presentation spaces.
You are Belgian and you have studied philosophy in Leuven and Paris, attended Derrida's seminars at the Sorbonne, then did a year of theatre and film studies. And then you went on to work as a production manager, run a theatre in Ghent, co-found a festival in Rotterdam and lead the Productiehuis (Production House) in Rotterdam, building your career in Flanders and Rotterdam. In 2012 you crossed into Germany to take over a very particular institution, HAU. That's quite a journey; running today one of Europe's busiest production houses. How did you end up in performing arts? What was the calling for you?
I love to watch, I love to sit in a theatre as a spectator. And that is still a motor for doing this job. If I ever lose that, I think I should do another job. There are colleagues of mine who are trained as an artist, but that's not me. I've never wanted to be on stage. My passion as a spectator started, when I was a kid and my mother took me to experience the occasional classical concert and ballet production that came to the small town where I went to school. Then as a teenager seeing Rosas with Rosas Danst Rosas really triggered something completely different. The stage was suddenly not only a place for the fairy tales of the ballet but taken by these fantastic women and their movements that had something to do with me and my life in that moment.
Might this early impression have anything to do with why you programmed The Goldberg Variations, BWV 988 by Alain Franco and Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker this season?
Anne Teresa has the age of my oldest sister, which means that she has been part of my entire professional life. She has been performing on the stages of the Rotterdamse Schouwburg and Hebbel-Theater (HAU1) , since the end of the 80s, long before my time. So, it's not me who brought her here. It's almost 40 years that she and her company are dancing on the wooden planks of that stage. I think that's great. And I'm honored to inherit that and to write new chapters to this history.
What you say about Anne Teresa that, “it's almost forty years she and her company have been dancing on those wooden planks, and that you feel honored to inherit that and write new chapters” tells me something about your approach. Is that also how you think about your own presence in a place; as something that accumulates, that needs time to become something?
If you look at resumés of other people my age, probably most of them have more “stations” than me. I worked in Rotterdam for 16 years, which is quite a long time. And here in Berlin I am in my 14th season! Apparently, I'm somebody who loves long stretches, rooting in a place, and doesn’t like jumping off after three, four years, maybe to do the same thing in another place. I like to have a longer breath and see how a theatre and the city are developing and what is my role in this. Also, it takes time to get to know your audiences. As Belgian arriving in the Netherlands, I was confronted with a different culture. Some of the companies and productions that worked super well in Flanders, were of no interest there. So, I needed to adapt my initial programme ideas to my new "local" context. Coming to Berlin, I was landing again in a different theater context, with a different history of performing arts.
Carolina Bianchi, The Brotherhood
I do also recognize differences in the ecosystem of each.
It's true. Each move meant learning and investing in new cultural politics, something I had not anticipated. In Germany, investing in relations with culture politics, lobbying for your ideas and budgets plays a much bigger role than in the Netherlands. And then there is the question of trust between the funders and the funded. The Dutch adopted me and still consider me as one of their own after having worked with them for sixteen years. When we ask the embassy for financial support for a project, they give the most and do not demand endless proof, because they trust that we will spend it well, and we do. In Germany it is different; the system is built on accountability, on providing evidence for everything, all the time. Also, the people in the arts are great colleagues, but the structural relationships are less built on solidarity than on concurrence.
HAU was born in 2003 from the merger of three historic Kreuzberg venues, and Matthias Lilienthal, who is now, interestingly, about to take over Volksbühne as the artistic director, spent nearly a decade building it into what it became. How much of what HAU is today do you think is your creation, and how much did you have to work against or around what was already there?
I would like to include Nele Hertling in the legacy because I feel I am also her successor. She opened the Hebbel-Theater shortly before the Wall came down, as the house for international performing arts, and she founded Tanz im August, the most important international dance festival in Germany. She is now 92, with a very sharp mind still. The Hebbel-Theater functioned as that international house for fifteen years; Bob Wilson produced here, Nele brought the American postmodern dance generation, Trisha Brown, Lucinda Childs, Steve Paxton, and she looked towards Eastern Europe as well. I feel very connected to what she was doing, also in terms of creating networks.
Lilienthal made the three separate houses function as one brand in 2003, and that was a real achievement. In 2003 it was the EasyJet generation; the city was becoming more international. What I added after 2012, others must say. But working in alliances is more in my DNA than in most of my German colleagues’, Nele aside. I arrived without fully knowing the direction. HAU without an ensemble matched my competencies from Rotterdam and before, but I quickly discovered how marginalized it is in a system where city theaters are the norm. That was the motor behind founding the Bündnis Internationaler Produktionshäuser (Alliance for International Production Houses) in 2016, with Hellerau, Kampnagel, Mousonturm, PACT, FFT and tanzhaus nrw; a structure for exchange, co-producing, supporting artists and joint lobbying that simply did not exist here before. And still, it is not as it should be. The logic of circulation and touring work simply is not in the DNA of city theaters that have ensembles, where directors and plays are coming to them, to work with the same actors. In the Netherlands and Belgium, it is entirely different: there is a traveling model, companies and productions are touring to the theatres in all those cities, which don’t have an ensemble anyway; it is born out of a social democratic principle, that art comes to the people.
As you mentioned HAU doesn’t operate with a permanent ensemble, which is structurally quite different from most German theatres, and from the Rotterdamse Schouwburg model you came from.
Big ensembles have a value, no doubt. There is something about the intergenerationality that I appreciate a lot; a range of depth that independent groups often lack, because they often were formed at school and have stayed the same cohort. But that is compensated by working with many different artists and groups, coming from different generations anyway. What interests me is following what a company or choreographer is developing, establishing long-term relationships with artists and what is driving them. We invest in a different form of authorship. That is what this house is all about; artists come to us with their ideas about what they want to create, why and with whom, and ask for advice and tips, but in the centre is always their self-determination. The ensemble model is simply different.
Miet Warlop, One Song
Would the ideal be to have both? Can you talk about what your model makes possible, and what it makes harder?
They are very different systems and rarely fit under the same roof. When companies like Gob Squad went to a city theater, they didn’t really feel at home, because they couldn’t work anymore according to their own rules. The advantage, for me, is that I know how to work in the field of the independent arts, it is kind of ‘my daily bread’. The disadvantage in Germany is the staggering financial imbalance; ensemble theaters receive millions upon millions, and the entire independent scene receives just a fraction of that. And I don’t complain since HAU is the largest independent house in the city, yet the gap is immense for the many smaller and important structures. This kind of artmaking is still not valued in its own right. That is frustrating. You know what we call it in Germany: Freie Szene (Free Scene). But “die Freie Szene” is not “frei”. No money, no freedom.
I've been attending meetings organized for the newcomers to the Freie Szene, and there's always this emphasis on freedom. But then you start to understand; even the smallest funding takes three, five years to access. Maybe. And at my stage of practice, I'm no longer 'emerging' which already places me outside certain categories. On top of that, one has to learn a very specific language to even apply. It's not free. It's a system with its own rules, its own vocabulary.
It's not free at all. These artists are masters of writing applications, and that takes a lifetime; time taken from creativity, from care, poured into a process that is essentially Russian roulette. No offence to the juries, whom I genuinely respect, but perhaps 10 to 20 percent of all applications are approved within the limits of the project budgets. However, all the others did the work too. Unpaid.
HAU is in Kreuzberg, one of the most ethnically diverse neighborhoods in Berlin. There’s a huge Turkish-German population here. How much does the geography matter to the programming?
It was not really part of the HAU DNA in the beginning. But there has always been a relationship with the school next door. I continued a project called “Houseclub”, what city theaters might call a youth club. We work with students aged fourteen or fifteen, young people who often don’t speak German at home, over two months, with artists who have their independent practice at HAU. There is a colleague working full-time devoted to this, and a very engaged outreach department called “HAU to connect”: For about seven years now, there has been a deeper investment in the neighborhood area Mehringplatz. Since we have our roots here together, we host the local theatre group “Mina e.V.” an inclusive, Turkish-German theater group. They collaborated on the square with Kaskad as part of our festival series “Berlin bleibt!” The fifth edition is coming in June. Now everyone in the neighborhood knows what HAU is, and that matters.
I always test how well a cultural space is integrated into its neighborhood by asking people on the street if they know where it is. If they have an idea, that's actually a good sign.
Our focus has been Mehringplatz, a space with a culturally diverse population. We encouraged our new restaurant to reach out to the neighborhood and people have started to come for lunch. “Berlin bleibt!” is also about being part of a neighborhood that has grown together alongside new housing and office real estate developments on the other side, which we more critically could call gentrification. Which it is. We are trying to make artistic and discursive programmes that honestly engage with those problematics.
Tanz im August has been part of Berlin's cultural landscape since 1989, and HAU has been its sole organizer since 2013, but it has its own artistic director and its own identity. And besides there is Nele Hertling whom you mentioned.
She was the founding mother, and that is also why she matters so much to me. She built almost an all-female team. Our technical director started as a young woman in Nele's time. That continuity says something. Nele is, for me, a good example.
But it's an interesting structural situation. Because you're producing something you're not fully programming. So how does that work for you? How do you keep that relationship between the festival and the institution alive?
I don't programme HAU alone either; there is always a multiplicity of voices around the table. The festival Tanz im August needed someone exclusively devoted to it, and since 2023, that is Ricardo Carmona. Before him, Virve Sutinen did a great job. The working relationship is one of exchange: Ricardo travels, sees a lot of work, and shares with us his experiences, and if a great work is not for the festival, we can consider it for the HAU-season. And vice versa, when I am traveling or the HAU dance curator Petra Poelzl. In the end I am responsible in a business sense, but I steer from behind. The opening production I won't name yet, it's still a secret. But it is an artist who has been close to HAU and will now have their premiere at Tanz im August. That continuity is something I loved in Rotterdam too; the production house, the festival, the regular programme all playing together. The curator has autonomy, but autonomy doesn't mean not exchanging. We share a value system. That is what makes it work.
Might this have to do with your philosophical formation which might still be actively shaping the way you think about a programme?
Philosophy in the sense of not simply agreeing all the time with what is being said, but remaining analytic, deconstructing, continuing to listen. In a team, that can be a pain sometimes, someone always asking one more question, pushing a little further, but I think this lust for thinking and for taking our work seriously is also connecting us. After a performance you don't say "let's have a drink and forget it." You value what artists put into it. It is damn hard to make a good show. Even the less good ones deserve our attention.
Now comes an unpleasant question about the budget cuts; Berlin's independent performing arts scene is facing serious budget cuts. What is at stake if/when the cuts go through?
The federal funding for the Bündnis Internationaler Produktionshäuser is completely gone. At HAU, we had some left-over budget from 2025 that we could stretch into 2026. And then in Berlin, after big cuts announcements in 2025 that were heavily protested against, the city reversed, so in 2025 we were relatively ok. For 2026 and 2027 we are looking at three percent funding cuts from the city, which is more or less manageable for us. The federal money will soon run out. Three percent is maybe not the biggest issue. The issue is the spirit behind the cuts. Why does it target the arts so much? Why does it hit programmes around accessibility and diversity? It is not neutral. We call it the grass razor, cutting at the roots while appearing to trim evenly. This creates real angst, for the entire scene. It seems that the question: What does a society want from its artists?, is now being answered in a very different way. We know that theatre is a place for gathering, bringing people together, connected to something other than consumption. It deals with questions about how society is functioning, with democracy; theatre can be a site for protest, for resistance. But when a government stops investing in the performing arts, it is very hard to proceed with only private money since we don’t sell anything you can own. And when the government frames it as merely leftist and woke, when it diabolizes it, an entire sector is disadvantaged in one move.
Do you think there's any possibility of reversing the cuts, of getting that funding back?
In Berlin, elections will be held in September, something will change. In which direction, we don't know. On the federal level there are still three years until the election. Until then, the Alliance leans more heavily on local support. For me, I have hopes for Berlin. Hamburg is strong. But Hellerau in Dresden is in a very difficult position facing significant local cuts already. The country is a patchwork of political realities. It is hard to say.
Forced Entertainment, Everything Must Go
HAU is for me one of the most rigorous and uncompromising stages in Berlin right now; a house that consistently takes risks with what performance can be. What I've noticed with your programming is that the artists you host seem to almost all have a radical relationship to form. They challenge what performance is, what theatre is, what it can do. And the very act of gathering becomes a political question; how you hold that time, what you share with an audience. So, when I look at your programming, I see a clear commitment to artists who are asking exactly that question. Would you say that's also how you see it?
You phrase it so well, and it connects to what I said earlier about authorship. These are artists creating from their own vision, from zero. There is always a critical distance towards the canon, towards what is usually done. Carolina Bianchi uses the canon to chew on it, and it hurts sometimes. Miet Warlop invests in psychological situations, emotional states, even when nothing is explicitly told. It is shown. That transmission through form is everything. It was already there with Rosas danst Rosas; first of all, it was form, great choreography, costume, movement. Not ballet at all. Something rebellious, a kind of rebellious young woman. I cannot imagine a life without contemporary dance, or without contemporary performance and theatre. I need both. Pieces by Forced Entertainment look relatively simple, but the layers are endless, and it is totally visceral. I am more interested in that than in a well-rounded play. Some of these works are not perfect. That is not the point. The hooks are there. We can criticize and that is fine.
You've described HAU, and I'm quoting from Berlin Bühnen here, as “a theatre that fits the times we live in while at the same time resisting and opposing them.” How do you know when that resistance is working?
Resistance can take many forms; it could even mean returning to ancient drama. What matters is making something meaningful in these times, for the people who are living them. The people in the audience are our contemporaries, our comrades, let's say. What is made must have some connection to them. And perhaps that is also the image: that we take the temperature of society, measure it, and say something about the feverish aspects of our times.
Yorumlar