Institutional Theatrics: Performing Arts Policy in Post-Wall Berlin by Brandon Woolf (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Institutional Theatrics: Performing Arts Policy in Post-Wall Berlin by Brandon Woolf
• James R. Ball III

INSTITUTIONAL THEATRICS: PERFORMING ARTS POLICY IN POST-WALL BERLIN. By Brandon Woolf. Performance Works. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2021; pp. 280.

Brandon Woolf’s Institutional Theatrics: Performing Arts Policy in Post-Wall Berlin investigates theatre that addresses and would transform the institutions that house it and the infrastructures that support it. In sum, the book proposes “a negative art of institutional dis/avowal [through which] an institution might embrace its own determinate negation [and] reckon with the particulars of its own contradictions” (14–15). Across the book’s chapters, this initial definition (a paraphrase of Theodor Adorno) develops as a subtle tool for theorizing the ways in which performance can directly and substantially participate in the making and executing of policy.

Woolf begins to elaborate this idea in his Introduction, arguing “performance functions as a performative art of policy” (20). This novel reversal of the conventional performance studies assertion that public policy is performative offers new coordinates from which to investigate, “performance’s potential to utilize the public institutions of its support to reimagine those very institutions from within” (23). The introduction begins with recent history: the protests, debates, and occupation that followed the announcement that Chris Dercon, then curator at London’s Tate Modern museum, would take over as the new director of the Volksbühne theater in the fall of 2017. Woolf’s account of these events models the methodology employed throughout the book: rigorous and detailed archival investigations combined with strategic and illuminating instances of participant observation and original interviews with key figures.

The work is organized into two parts: “State-Stages” and “Free-Scenes.” Each part is composed of two chapters; the first chapter sets the stage for the “particular policy problematic” (21) in question, and the second offers a case study of performance as policy. Chapter 1 begins with the closure of the State-Stage Complex and follows the policy debates that ensued as they moved between parliamentary sessions, backroom negotiations, public press reports, and performances throughout the Complex. For Woolf, this history is “a springboard and strategic counterpoint—a site of dis/avowal—for the chapters that follow” (31). Though rife with moments in which key participants and their performances flirted with modes of infrastructural reimagining, the events of 1993 did not produce the same art of institutional dis/avowal apparent in subsequent cases.

Chapter 2 provides the first such counterpoint, Frank Castorf’s 2012 production Lehrstück. “Re-functioning” emerges in the chapter as a critical conceptual refinement of institutional dis/avowal. Building on Bertolt Brecht’s efforts to “refunction the theatre apparatus itself,” the book argues that Castorf in turn refunctioned Brecht, “to imagine, and subsequently enact, a new kind of public—and publicly supported—theatre in post-wall Berlin” (68–69). What emerges is “an art of dis/avowal that leans into systems of support” to undo them (86). As Castorf has put it in interviews, “Especially if you are funded through tax money […] you have the duty to be subversive. You have to be ungrateful” (86). This approach neither acquiesces to the compromises implicit in working within institutions nor refuses participation in institutionalized systems of support. It accepts the institution, warts and all, as a structural element to be played with, to be challenged even as it is embraced.

Part Two shifts focus slightly from institutions to the infrastructures of support undergirding them, and especially the infrastructures constituting Berlin’s free-scene of independent artists and ensembles. Chapter 3 introduces these infrastructures via an investigation of “the ways performance and memory animate public institutions” (107), specifically the Palast der Republik, the former seat of the East German Parliament. Drawing on Shannon [End Page 579] Jackson and debates between Jacques Derrida and the architect Daniel Libeskind, Woolf asks, “how might a performance institution dis/avow itself by embracing the temporal disjunction of the spectral?” (115). He finds his answer in a group of artists who proposed temporary artistic interventions in the space, the Zwischennutzung initiative, which refused “restorative nostalgia” in favor of a “reflective nostalgia […] that longs for a ‘future that went...