Bauerntheater – Work as art, art as work, and everything else…

A peculiar informational plaque posted in a field in Joachimsthal reads:

The man on the field is playing Flint, the main character of Heiner Mueller’s 1961 play ‘Die Umsiedlerin’ (The Resettler). His movements, thoughts and expressions have been rehearsed in New York City. He is planting half a ton of potatoes.

Meanwhile, Berlin Mitte abounds in posters inviting to Bauernthearer.

The actor David Barlow spent 14 hours per day for one month (5th - 28th May) in the Brandenburg countryside farming and acting, with or without an audience, as part of Bauerntheater (farmers’ theatre), an artistic project lead by ECLA instructor David Levine. In a recent interview with Zyxt, he gave us some insight into his past, his work and his current project Baurentheater. Mr. Levine holds a Masters in English Literature from Harvard University. However, his interest in theatre and performance came to him at an earlier age from his mother, a concert pianist. From early on Mr. Levine was interested in the idea of “sculpting an audience in time and space,” which is not possible in conventional theatre as the audience is already pre-sculpted.

Mr. Levine says the way that the spectatorship is predefined or “pre-sculpted” in theatre and in art galleries is something he has always wanted to explore. This sculpting also defines what the audience sees and how it sees it. For instance, going to a theatre hall one expects a theatre and whatever is shown is classified under theatre. With Baurentheater, most go thinking its theatre, some come out of it questioning what it is, others would call it landscape art rather than installation art. The terms to define Baurentheater are important says Mr. Levine, they define how the spectators approach the project. However, as to how they classify it, Mr. Levine is not too concerned what they call it, but is more concerned with why they call it what they call it.

A visit to Baurentheater is an invitation to perplexity and confusion. It raises a number of issues that seems irresolvable and paradoxical. You are immediately confronted with a slight repulsion of treating a man toiling on a field as an object, but then realizing its all an act, you ask, “so this it?” A man ploughing a field doesn’t seem to be much of a theatrical performance to say the least. Can this even be called theatre? But then again, the actor, Mr. Barlow, is playing the role of an actual character in a play. In the play he is a farmer and this is a depiction of him “on stage.” Perhaps the most perplexing thing is the stage itself and the real work being “performed.”

The stage for Baurentheater was set by Mr. Levine with the help of the Biorama project. The plot of land chosen as the stage has an interesting history. Currently, it is part of an eco-tourism project, which is essentially a post-modern simulation of ecology that borders on the hyperreal. However, not so long ago, during the DDR times, it was a part of a communal farming project. The play Mr. Levine picked is set during these DDR times, when a man was given a plot of land and told to farm. Mr. Barlow’s outfit, tools and reflectively character are part of this landscape. For any 21st century audience, his clothes are out of tune but the stark lack of technological tools utilized in the farming is only a secondary thought. In the age of the internet, somehow, farming still retains its hands on significance. Mr. Levine claims that the way we use land, how the land itself acquires new meaning and even a new identity is something he hoped to raise through this project.

The project also brings into question the technique of method acting (life-like, realistic performance and actors being able to holistically embody the characters). As David Levine explained during the panel discussion held in Joachimsthal on the 12th of May (Why Watch Work?), in many ways method acting requires the actor to go through a “crash course” in appropriating the skills of the character. In this sense, a method actor is a person of whom it is expected to learn any profession in a short period of time. Could David Barlow then embody the character of a German farmer after one month’s training in New York and then actually successfully plant potatoes? Bauerntheater thus re-evaluates the relationship between acting and the stage by questioning the meaning of method acting technique in the context of the artificial setting of the stage.

If acting to some degree involves imitating a character’s professional work, then the question arises – why go to the theatre to see an actor play a farmer, when one can see a farmer anywhere out on a field or, in more general terms, why use theatre to reproduce reality? The confusion of the Bauerntheater audience expresses this problem well: is the man on the field an actor, a farmer or an actor playing a farmer? Upon this realisation, one no longer knows how to respond to the situation. Should we be indifferent at the banal sight of a man farming, or feel sympathy for the actor exhausted by physical labour? In this sense, Bauerntheater manages to successfully blur the distinction between reality and performance.

The holistic experience seems to be what Bauerntheater aims at by taking spectators in the middle of nowhere and exposing them to the agrarian experience: climb the Wasserturm and see the land from above, stand in the hot noon sun and feel empathy for the actor, walk on the field and be bothered by insects. When most city dwellers and people used to traditional stage theatre are put in the actual place where the action is set, catharsis gains new meanings; also, the action itself is ultimately raw: it comes down to the shovel. In such circumstances, it may be argued that the actor’s own performance comes second in impressing the audience and, instead of it, the setting attracts most of the attention – the field acts itself, so do the tools, so do the seeds.

Can planting potatoes actually bear any artistic connotations? Of course, if we so wish it. Bauerntheater is what it is only because spectators are told so; without that informational plaque, David Barlow’s farming would be deprived of theatrical meaning to the passers-by. If, on the contrary, we wish to ignore the explanatory notes, then acting is indeed just a job, exactly like farming.