Theatre Design & Technology - Spring 1999 - 50

throughout histol)'. But, that theater can be
used to criticize government is no longer important." If the theater were used exclusively
for political purposes, it would no longer have
meaning. And Hanig is passionate about creating meaningful theater.

THEATER In GERmAny

Though Hanig continues to work in Germany, he has become disillusioned with the
slate of the theater and now spends part of his
time working in Cyprus. He lost interest in the
German theater because, in his opinion, it had
become too self-indulgent. He saw too many
people for whom working in the theater was

about "career development." There was too
much egotism and not enough group identification. He felt an imbalance between aesthetics and costs. He says, "I believe one danger in
the theater at the moment is all the heavy
metal, the construction that costs so much
money. As a scene designer, I think it needs to
get simpler. One begins to question if all of
these giant-sized effects that one finds in Germany are necessary."
The German theater system is a massive
and heavily subsidized organization. A huge
bureaucracy has evolved. Layers of administration, in Hanig's experience, have frustrated and thwarted the artists tl)'ing to
create within the system. He complains, "I
think that this organization with production

Production photos; Musik by Frank Wedekind; directed by Frank Hanig,

......-_...1
48

Staatschauspiel Dresden, 1996

SPRING

I 9 9 9

TZ>&T

manager and under him assistants and under them the scene shop foreman, and on
and on is too ponderous. It's like the stol)'
where one person describes something to
another and that person to the next, and so
on, until at the end, the thing is nowhere
close to what it started out as. One hasn't
enough contact with the technical shops and
costume department to trust that the
craftspeople know which part they hold in
their hand or why something must be sewn
in a particular way. One really cannot expect
the craftspeople in the State Theater to know
this anymore."
Hanig is frustrated by the disproportionate amount of funding that goes into the
administration of the theaters, rather than to
the hiring of artists. "In Germany four-fifths
of the money is tied up in administration,"
he complains. "We have more administrative people, more secretaries and what have
you than artists in our theaters. It's expensive. What is actually left over for artists is
one-fifth of the money. One must imagine
this. And the different labor unions in the
theater... the technicians have unions as if it
were a normal business. aturally they
watch the clock...you can see it. But, there
is a new spin on it...the theater must be "democratized" in the sense that workers rights
are to be observed. It has nothing to do with
enthusiasm anymore. I am no bureaucrat. I
am an artist, period. And whoever doesn't
want to do that...I'm sorl)'. I won't compromise anymore."
"A theater needs to have a face, an
identity," Hanig continues. "It needs to
make someone's particular [artistic] handwriting clear. What kind of optical stories do
we want to tell in the theater? What do we
have in the costume department? In which
direction can we go then? Companies are
lined up like exchange packages. There are
gradually fewer resident designers, actors
and directors: the foundation of the theater.
aturally there is no longer a permanent artistic director. One leaves and then the next
one comes and brings a whole new troupe
with him. Everything that one has built before is exterminated. That is not a healthy
renewal. It is simply arbitrariness. What before was in Bochum is now in Dresden, and
what was in Dresden is now in Berlin.
Where is the difference? I think it is just a
means of giving everyone currently involved
in the theater something to do."

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Theatre Design & Technology - Spring 1999