Western theatre in our modern understanding is one in which every conflict is represented on stage as a conflict between human beings. The real sphere of drama is the inter-human and the sphere in which drama thus occurs is the anthroposphere. The peculiarity and special artistry of the theatre of modern times is that everything that appears as action in drama is based on conflicts that involve people in contradictions that compel them to act. In pre-bourgeois theatre and also in some fields of contemporary popular culture and the avant-garde, however, this fixation on the interpersonal does not exist – the anthroposphere is dissolved and space given to other species, spirits and things. In antiquity and in the Middle Ages, it was gods who played a role, in Shakespeare, was mixed beings. Then in Susanne Kennedy we find machine beings and cyborgs, and in BothoStrauß’s plays, animated, living things. Here the events on stage grow beyond the anthroposphere and make visible something like a ‘Gaia theatre’.
Thomas Oberender, born in 1966 in Jena, is an author and curator. Since 2011 he has been the Artistic and Managing Director of Berliner Festspiele / Gropiusbau. He was the founder of several new formats for perfomance, literature and cultural programmes, and created timebased exhibitions. From 2006–2011 he was Director of Drama at the Salzburg Festival, after that he was leading dramaturg of the Schauspiel Bochum and Co-Director of the Schauspielhaus in Zurich. He submitted his doctoral thesis on Botho Strauß and co-founded and named the author’s collective Theater Neuen Typs. He has written essays, theater and literature reviews and is currently working as Artistic Director of the transmedial programme “Immersion“, that also opens planetariums as spaces for artists of the digital age.