This article first appeared in the Berlin Art Week 2026 special issue of Freitag.
Kostya’s cry for recognition in Chekhov’s ›The Seagull‹ has long since become a theatrical cliché. »We need new forms,« he declares. »New forms are what we need, and if we can’t have them, then we’d better have nothing.« The tedium of a summer estate in tsarist Russia may feel a world away, but Kostya’s outburst suddenly sounds timely again as two Berlin theatres—Maxim Gorki Theater and the Volksbühne—set out this September to explore what theatre can mean today. And Ersan Mondtag, one of the hottest directors on the German-language theatre scene, is also leaving the theatre behind for Berlin Art Week, swapping it for the galleries of the Gemäldegalerie in a collaboration with the Berliner Ensemble.
Behind the »art barn« currently under construction—as the future Berlin Modern museum is known, half affectionately and half in jest—the Gemäldegalerie crouches somewhat inconspicuously. Nowhere else, surely, is venerable art displayed quite so discreetly. Works by the »Old Masters« hang on walls whose velvet coverings are already looking a little worn: Albrecht Dürer, Raphael, Titian—the list could easily go on. The galleries exude the unhurried calm of the late nineteen-nineties and resemble the set of a heist movie in which the loot can all too easily be whisked past sleeping guards and bundled into a waiting car. Into this setting, Ersan Mondtag and Nadim Samman are placing a performance designed to interact not only with the works but with the city of Berlin itself, as Samman tells me over the phone.
Bodies that have stored time
The curator and writer is on holiday, but takes the time to talk about Berlin, the cult of the body and the Gemäldegalerie. Fittingly, the performance is called ›Alternde Meister‹ (Ageing Masters) and takes aim at the obsessive desire for youthful bodies. Performance art, Samman says, often revolves around young bodies with defined muscles. Nudity gets deployed for shock value, even though it lost its power to shock long ago. Their performance instead focuses on the scars, wrinkles—in short, the imperfections and stories that such a bodily shell can tell. Mondtag, shortly before his premiere at the Salzburg Festival, confirms by text message: the brightly lit, trained body holds no appeal for him. »I’m interested in a different body. The body that has stored time.« And so, alongside the familiar faces (and bodies) of actors Eva-Maria Keller and Frank Büttner, bouncer Frank Künster, legendary nineteen-nineties techno figure WestBam and artist Candice Breitz, the cast also includes two pensioners: Birgit and Günther.
Lucas Cranach the Elder’s ›The Fountain of Youth‹ provides the framework for the roughly thirty-minute cycles. The painting, which hangs in the Gemäldegalerie between two depictions of Venus, shows old women arriving in carts and being undressed. Stooped, they step into the fountain, emerging on the other side as young women. They are dressed, gather for a feast or disappear straight into the bushes with one of the men vying for their attention. The performance ›Alternde Meister‹ follows the painting’s structure. Initially naked, the performers get dressed and wander through the galleries before gathering around one of their number. Unlike theatre, where there is the »beautiful belief« that you will see the entire piece, with performance, Mondtag writes, »it’s enough if a single gesture remains. An old man being washed. A woman eating alone. A chorus coming from another room.«
For Mondtag, whose solo exhibition ›Dispair‹, featuring sculptures and reliefs, also opens at Galerie Dittrich & Schlechtriem during Berlin Art Week, it is »about the moment when the museum suddenly develops a pulse«. The paintings, the building and its historical layers become protagonists in their own right. Few places, Samman explains over the phone, contain so many histories layered one on top of another. Kirchner’s Expressionist street scenes spring to mind, along with wartime ruins, the fenced-off border zone and the former wasteland around Potsdamer Platz. In a city like Berlin, caught in what Samman calls its »Peter Pan complex«—an insatiable desire to remain young—he and Mondtag turn our attention instead to its scars and wrinkles.
They are hard to miss elsewhere, too. The Maxim Gorki Theater is a »construction site«, says its new artistic director Çağla Ilk. And she doesn’t just mean the building work: the programme itself is under construction. After thirteen years at the helm—almost a Merkel era—Shermin Langhoff left the Gorki, where she had made theatre history, turning it more than any other institution into a home for »post-migrant theatre«. Ilk, who herself worked at the Gorki for many years, returns to Berlin after curatorial posts in Baden-Baden and at the German Pavilion in Venice. Now she is turning the Gorki upside down. To stick with the construction-site metaphor: no stone will be left unturned.
Some see these changes, both inside and out, as a threat. They fear for text-based theatre, complaining that an »event venue« is taking its place, that a permanent ensemble is giving way to a loose network and that programmatic clarity is being replaced by high-flown rhetoric. In conversation, Ilk explains that she no longer wants to think of the Gorki as divided into stage, auditorium, and foyer. Instead, she wants to test the boundaries between theatre and performance, between acting and visual art.
As part of Berlin Art Week’s »Featured« section, Turkish-Armenian conceptual artist Sarkis transforms the Gorki’s stage and auditorium into an installation about Polish theatre maverick Tadeusz Kantor. At the same time, the theatre extends onto the neighbouring Platz der Märzrevolution. Kantor was already breaking with theatrical conventions in the nineteen-sixties. When one of his productions in Baden-Baden was cancelled after just one performance in 1965, he promptly moved it to a casino. Kantor’s own practice of taking theatre beyond its institutional boundaries finds a concrete counterpart on Platz der Märzrevolution, where historical materials from his circle meet new performance works by the Gorki ensemble. Crossing boundaries, then, is less a trend than a search inherent to theatre itself: a search for ways to activate spaces and for ways bodies can move within them. Rather than pitting theatre against performance, Ilk wants to find new forms: »Performance is a kind of theatre.«
That view of theatre could just as easily have drifted across from the other side of the Spree. While people continue splashing around in the new Volksbad on Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz until October, inside the Volksbühne Florentina Holzinger is busy undermining the boundaries between theatre and performance with her productions—if not quite setting them ablaze. Audiences sometimes react with shock to the radicalism of her work. Amid all the skateboarding nuns, heavily motorised vehicles and hooks pushed into the flesh of cheeks on stage, the humour in her productions can easily get overlooked. As a member of the Artistic Board, she is likely to tattoo her signature onto Matthias Lilienthal’s artistic directorship, at the latest once the Austrian Pavilion she currently occupies in Venice has been dismantled. In the meantime, Berlin Art Week presents ›Eternity‹, the first film to bring her art to the cinema. Director Susanne Regina Meures picks up Holzinger’s recurring motifs: naked women and cars, this time set against the dark horizon of global collapse. Accompanied by music from Peaches, a group of female friends sets off for the eternal ice in search of redemption.
What form that redemption might take remains an open question. One thing, however, is certain: a tremor is running through the theatre world. Whether at the new Gorki, the Volksbühne or temporary venues such as the Gemäldegalerie, theatre is searching for new forms. Let’s hope that, unlike Kostya in Chekhov’s ›The Seagull‹, it doesn’t end up shooting itself. Or if it does, then only as a stage death that ends in applause.