Bertie Alexander profiles one of Berlin’s leading theatrical institutions…
It’s a wintry Wednesday night in Berlin and I’m people-watching in the Wirtshaus am Ufer (WAU) café-restaurant. Situated on Hallesches Ufer, and directly connected to HAU2 – one of the three venues that make up the collective HAU theatres – the cafe overlooks the Landwehrkanal and is always open whether there are shows running or not.
The crowd tonight is the usual interesting mix of theatrical and literary types as well as those drawn towards the conspicuously bright lights along this quiet stretch of Kreuzberg. After a short while, a tall, slender lady with a mane of mahogany curls walks in; Annemie Vanackere, Artistic Director of HAU Hebbel am Ufer since she took over from her acclaimed predecessor Matthias Lilienthal in 2012.
With a smile and a look around the fairly busy room, Vanackere suggests we move into a side room for a little more peace and quiet. The room is mostly bare save for the animal portraits featured on HAU postcards and posters: a grinning monkey, a suave fox, a tousled looking llama.
“It’s about the perspective of another species,” Vanacker explains, following my eyes, “which is usually not heard about, since it’s not white, male and heterosexual. As Donna Haraway [a professor in Feminist Studies at the University of Santa Cruz] says, it seems that the only ones who can talk about the rainforest are Greenpeace and European and American scientists, but not the ones who actually live in the rainforest.”
Hailing from Belgium and speaking Dutch, French and English but only a little German, Vanackere has spent much of the last three years convincing Berlin’s theatre circles that she can sustain Lilienthal’s legacy and maintain Hau’s place as one of the most important avant-garde theatrical institutions in the city. Fortunately she’d had some experience of such challenges, having worked at the Rotterdamse Schouwburg since the end of 1995, becoming Artistic Director in 2001.
Since taking the reins at Hau, she has orchestrated two successful annual programmes that have deliberately pushed the theatre group in a more international direction; a strategy intended, in her own words, to add “some new accents”. During our conversation, she speaks of Berlin as a “cultural boiling pot”, a city that wears its history like a hair shirt but that is also changing faster than almost any other European city. She explains how it’s this that makes HAU’s work so important, how the theatre’s mission is to engage with the current situation on the streets; not providing answers necessarily but posing yet more questions to its audience in a quest to gain a better comprehension of what’s happening.
In one sense this is a direct continuation of the HAU ethic – a ‘hysterical longing for reality’ as Lilienthal, who was the first to lead the collective HAU (Hebbel am Ufer) theatres back in 2003, once put it. This stretching for a Vernetzung, or …