BERLIN EXHIBITION

It's not all that often that you bump into your entire social circle on the street after an event - engrossed in discussion, sometimes with, sometimes without a bottle or glass in their hands, whether sitting, standing or leaning. Surprisingly, they all come from different events, sometimes even from three different ones - be it a theatre play, a dance performance or an experimental concert. The social density, this feeling that everyone is here, could be due to the fact that the three different houses of HAU Hebbel am Ufer that I am talking about here hosted a festival together. This festival attracted an audience that was connected thematically, artistically and in terms of target groups.

However, there are also cases in which the encounters are due to distant events - be it a temporarily resident theatre company from the USA in one house, a queer re-enactment project in another and a doom metal concert in a third. As a result, subcultural scenes, some of which were already close, meet for a drink before or after the events in the fourth house, the WAU, the catering area.

Since the 1990s, various new hybrid theatre genres have developed in Berlin, reflecting the fact that the city has had to absorb the previously dispersed and locally specialised cultural scenes of the old Federal Republic and the old GDR. What was once big in Frankfurt am Main as critical theory, in Hamburg as the pop music underground and in Cologne as the visual arts scene, has now landed in Berlin. There are many surviving, temporarily used and revitalised venues.

HAU Hebbel am Ufer reacted to this mixed situation not only in terms of content, but above all on an institutional level. As a multi-part concatenation of places, it articulated that what happens in these places belongs together. HAU developed a form by creating three venues that are suitable for very different formats of performing arts in the broadest sense. From the very beginning, thematic weekends were anchored in the HAU programme, consisting of discussions and artistic performances on the themes of the theatre programme.

The HAU became an institution of this genre. The territorial principle of the three theatres with practically neighbouring gastronomy corresponds in a peculiarly formal way to what HAU is all about, much more appropriately than the often used term interdisciplinarity. So there seems to be something stronger that determines this programme and has to do with the special interconnectedness of the three houses.