Unaccountable theatre: intermedial play in the theatres of Frank Castorf and René Pollesch at the Volksbühne Berlin

© 2017 Dr. Henriette Christiane Kassay-SchusterThis thesis examines the politics of intermediality in the context of contemporary German theatre. It focuses on the aesthetic and political commitment to intermediality – a mode of engagement that negotiates the relational – in the theatres of Frank Castorf and René Pollesch at the Volksbühne Berlin. I explore how these theatres use live video relay to destabilise the spatial, temporal and semiotic orders of the Western theatre apparatus. I argue that intermedial play in these theatres challenges and re-imagines contemporary social, ideological and political formations – in Europe and beyond. My proposition is that Castorf’s and Pollesch’s use of intermedial play is deeply informed by Friedrich Schiller’s understanding of play as political act, assertion of humanity and experience of freedom as non-domination. Castorf’s, Pollesch’s and Schiller’s aesthetico-political projects converge insofar as all three conceive of aesthetic freedom as an expression of autonomous, agential selfhood. All three share a socio-political investment into the arts and theatre to facilitate communal bonds, on the one hand, and alternatives to totalising, hegemonic logics, on the other. It is here, I suggest, that intermediality as aesthetics, mode of engagement and political-ethical perspective might be leveraged to re-imagine social and political order. I therefore propose that a commitment to the intermedial can be understood as a political act in the Schillerian sense. This commitment, I suggest, is this the achievement and the legacy of the Castorf era at the Volksbühne Berlin