United stages of Bolzano

The German-speaking professional theater in Bozen , the United Theaters Bozen ( VBB for short ), are the largest German spoken theater company in South Tyrol . This plays in the Bolzano City Theater and is thus the counterpart to the Italian Teatro Stabile di Bolzano .

With in-house productions by the spoken and musical theater divisions , the VBB en-suite play around 120 performances per season. With changing production ensembles, the United Theaters of Bolzano play in the large house and the studio stage of the Bolzano City Theater.

The United Theaters of Bozen are a legally recognized association and are subsidized by the State of South Tyrol and the municipality of Bozen. Irene Girkinger has been the artistic director since August 1, 2012.

structure

Staff & Ensemble

The VBB team consists of 25 permanent and freelance employees in administration, public relations and placement work, service, stage and technology. The VBB do not employ a permanent ensemble .

philosophy

In addition to the current productions, the Vereinigte Bühnen Bozen also offer concerts, information evenings, discussions with experts or films and exhibitions - mostly in cooperation with other local institutions.

By working with local and foreign organizations and artists, the United Theaters would like to be an important communication and cultural vehicle in the country.

history

prehistory

In the 1950s, the South Tyrolean theater landscape flourished again - the “Bund Südtiroler Laienspielbühnen” (later “Bund Südtiroler Volksbühnen”, today “Südtiroler Theaterverband” ) and the “ Südtiroler Kulturinstitut ”, which specializes in guest performances, were founded .

As early as the late 1970s, South Tyrolean theater makers tried in vain, and against the will of the official cultural policy of the time, to add a permanent South Tyrolean professional theater to the theater system that had existed since the end of the war.

Founding of the United Theaters of Bozen

The otherwise rather individually acting theater makers from Bolzano recognized the need to form a “community of interests” in order to use spatial, technical and financial resources more effectively and to represent the common theater-political vision of a German-speaking professional theater more effectively.

In February 1992 four Bolzano theater associations - "South Tyrolean Ensemble Theater " (Erich Innerebner), "Initiative" (Waltraud Staudacher), "Cabaret Theater " (Manfred Schweigkofler) and "Talferbühne Bozen" (Johann Winkler) - joined the "United Theaters of Bolzano" (VBB for short) together. The city of Bolzano, for its part, sent a clearly positive signal in favor of this new initiative by becoming a founding, sponsoring and board member of the United Theaters of Bolzano (at the instigation of the theater-dedicated city councilor Inge Bauer-Polo) and thus for the first time a member of a German-speaking theater association. The newly founded VBB had a permanent office with administrative rooms on Sparkassenstrasse and a full-time office worker, as well as two rehearsal rooms and a fund of technical devices, props and costumes. However, there was no permanent theater location, which is why the performances of the three to four productions per year were spread across the available theater rooms in the city of Bolzano. The creation of a uniform program in terms of content and concept turned out to be difficult, however, as each of the four clubs continued to act independently of the association for the United Theaters of Bozen in their choice of plays.

The way to a professional theater business

In 1995 the association was reorganized for the first time, because the prerequisites for a professional German-speaking theater business were a regulated staff and management structure, as well as a uniform schedule. The Bühnen, under the presidency of Waltraud Staudacher, commissioned Alfred Meschnigg as an external artistic advisor in 1996. In the following two seasons he designed a uniform repertoire of seven productions a year, published a monthly information sheet, established cooperation with other theater groups in the country and hired six to seven permanent employees.

Georg Mittendrein was appointed artistic director of the United Theaters of Bolzano in 1998 from among 60 candidates (the position was advertised publicly). With his appointment, a decisive step was taken in the direction of professional theater business. In the “Baracke am Bahnhof” , the provisional venue for the 1998/99 season, Mittendrein relied for the first time on professional performance with regular weekly performance days and a “rump ensemble” of four permanent actors. He increased the staff to ten permanent employees and designed a remarkable program of nine in-house productions and numerous guest performances. His artistic successes with the musical “Nonnsense”, Büchner's “ Woyzeck ” or the tavern opera “Heimatlos” are still remembered by many viewers.

Georg Mittendrein left the United Theaters of Bolzano shortly before moving into the new city theater, after he was able to reach 12,414 spectators in 145 performances with his program. The board of directors of the VBB set up a management committee at short notice to implement the game plan created by Mittendrein for 1999/2000.

Moving into the New City Theater Bolzano

In September 1999 the New City Theater was officially opened. In addition to the Italian Teatro Stabile and the Bolzano City Theater Foundation, the Vereinigte Bühnen Bozen moved into administrative rooms in the new building. The VBB inaugurated their new permanent venue in October 1999 with two premieres: at the opening of their theater season, the great Shakespeare's love drama “ Romeo and Juliet ” played in the Great House and the South Tyrolean contemporary drama by Herbert Rosendorfer “Oh Tyrol or The Last Stylit of the pillar ” in the studio theater of the New City Theater.

This season another six in-house productions followed on the main stage and the studio stage, which presented a major organizational and artistic challenge in the new theater. The first time at the New City Theater was extremely turbulent for the United Theaters of Bolzano: the new theater required well-functioning processes, a professional staff, a continuous program, the acquisition of appropriate financial resources, acceptance in South Tyrolean society and the search for a solid management structure that should handle all of these tasks.

After only three months, the transitional directorate handed over the artistic direction of VBB to Emanuel Bohn in January 2000. He planned and designed the 2000/01 season, but did not manage to continue Georg Mittendrein's successful course in the New City Theater.

Change of artistic director and new beginning

Thomas Seeber, acting president of the association, took over the management of the workforce and the artistic design of the 2001/02 program at the request of the board in July 2001. What the local media had already announced as a downfall turned out to be a successful new beginning.

The goals already set with the move into the city theater, namely the structural expansion of a professional theater business and a theater producing in South Tyrol, for South Tyrol and with South Tyrol, have been achieved. Thomas Seeber focused on continuity: at least six in-house productions took place every year, two of them in the large house and four in the studio theater. He reduced the performances from 81 (in 1999/2000) to 57 performances in 2001/02. Nevertheless, he managed to increase the audience.

Structurally, new accents were also set: Seeber tried to integrate the VBB more into the existing theater landscape through annual cooperation with various partners at home and abroad and employed a large number of South Tyrolean artists in front of and behind the scenes.

For two of the six productions from 2001/02 he won the Schauspielhaus Salzburg and the Stadttheater Bruneck as cooperation partners. In the 2003/04 season, the United Theaters of Bozen not only cooperated with one of the local city theaters (the Merano theater in the old town ), but also with in-house partners: The world premiere of “Die Wette / La Scommessa” , the first bilingual and extremely successful co-production with the Italian-speaking Teatro Stabile di Bolzano, as well as Shakespeare's "Hamletas" with Teatro Stabile di Bolzano and the Stadttheater Foundation. This enabled a connection to the local theater scene and an opening beyond the borders of South Tyrol. The cooperation also had practical advantages: costs were saved and the respective production was made accessible to a wider audience.

The annual musical productions that took place in May , from “ Kiss me Kate ” to “ Evita ”, “Jesus Christ Superstar” or “ West Side Story ” to “ Jekyll & Hyde ”, “ Into the Woods ” and “ Cabaret ” were an indignant hit with the public. . In doing so, the United Theaters of Bolzano fulfilled their educational mandate with challenging theater pieces, but also did justice to the audience with entertaining and musical pieces.

Success as a public theater

The restructuring of the VBB was pushed ahead with financial and legal security for the new theater stage by city and country. In 2003 the new statutes were approved, which gave the association the function of a public theater. The original individual stages were finally dissolved in favor of the joint institution and the unified theater company Vereinigte Bühnen Bozen. In addition to the representatives of the city, representatives of the state government (at that time director of the cultural department Berta Linter) were also involved in the board.

The VBB won not only approval in politics, but also in the population: In the 2002/03 season, 18,464 viewers saw the seven in-house productions in 76 performances. Not only Brecht's “ Threepenny Opera ”, but also “The Physicists” and “Amadeus” enjoyed widespread audience approval. The highlights of the 2003/04 season were Shakespeare's “König Lear” directed by Kurt Veth , the world premiere “Ex” by Selma Mahlknecht , the bilingual play “Die Wette / La Scommessa” by Ferruccio Cainero and “Der Zerrissene” by Johann Nestroy , with 5,614 spectators the most successful spoken theater production of the VBB. In the 2004/05 season, when the United Theaters in Bolzano put the motto “love, lust and passion” under the heading, special attention was paid to the Tyrolean playwright Felix Mitterer . He wrote the drama "Fleisch" based on a true story on behalf of the United Theaters of Bozen. Other artistic highlights of the season were “Die Möwe” by Anton Chekhov , directed by Kurt Veth, the successful attempt at a revival (“Die Wette / La Scommessa”) and, at the end of the season, Webber's musical classic “ Jesus Christ Superstar ”.

Expansion of the venues to include South Tyrol's theater

VBB put the new 2005/06 theater season under the motto “Images of People”. In two productions in the large house, five studio productions and, for the first time, a youth play on the rehearsal stage of the city theater, the VBB put people and their personal fates at the center. Worth mentioning: "Request concert / Gassosa" by Roberto Cavosi / Franz Xaver Kroetz , the second successful collaboration with the Teatro Stabile di Bolzano. On two evenings, two one-act plays alternately in German and Italian were performed on the stage. The two directors Marco Bernardi and Thomas Seeber put the “German / Italian theater cooperation” on a completely new basis.

The VBB's first South Tyrol tour was also new in the late autumn of 2005: with Patrick Barlow's “The Messiah” traveling all over South Tyrol, they supported the cultural and political wish of institutional donors for a performance in the most important theaters in the country (in Meran, Brixen, Bruneck and Schlanders) invoice.

Every year around Christmas time, the VBB put a children's play on stage for the whole family, with " How Zorbas the cat taught the little seagull to fly ", based on the novel of the same name by Luis Sepúlveda , in an adaptation by Horst Herrmann and Stephen Lloyd, the most successful to date Was a children's piece. The two highlights in the large house were the comedy "Der nackte Wahnsinn" by Michael Frayn and the musical "West Side Story" by Leonard Bernstein. Overall, the 2005/06 season was the best season since the VBB was founded in terms of visitor numbers (32,019) and the range of performances (with 127 performances). Worth mentioning this season were the modern classic “ Death of a Salesman ” by Arthur Miller and “Faith, Love, Hope” by Ödön von Horváth, which uncovered the human fate of addiction and social decline.

The theater as a social meeting place

In the early years of Seebers' directorship, it was primarily about acceptance and anchoring in society, but the dialogue with the audience has now increasingly been intensified: the program of teacher training courses and introductions to plays, conceived by dramaturge Kathrin Gschleier in 2001, continuously turned to workshops and discussions , Readings, exhibitions, author meetings and interdisciplinary cultural events such as the "Cult.urnacht" expanded. With their plays, the United Theaters of Bolzano also addressed current social issues in the country in order to provide important socio-political and artistic impulses.

From the 2006/07 season onwards, the VBB dealt more closely with the social issues of our time. The Shakespeare comedy “ Was ihr wollt ” dealt with the sexual rapprochement between men and women, and an educational debate was brought up in Willy Russell's play “Education for Rita”, which played successfully in the Auditorium Roen . The topic of dignified dying, which was widely discussed in December, was given a theater forum with particularly obvious topicality in “Alice's Journey to Switzerland”, the stories about National Socialism and euthanasia by the Swiss playwright Lukas Bärfuss . In the 2006/07 season, the youth theater club was introduced, for which the VBB selected ten young actors in castings and developed the socially critical youth play " Die Welle " by Reinhold Tritt as a studio production.

In the 2007/08 season, the pieces about loneliness and cold relationships were shown in “Der einsame Weg” by Arthur Schnitzler and “Spielweise, Zwei im Quadrat” by Sergi Belbel. The children's and youth plays " Around the World in 80 Days " by Jules Verne, which will be resumed in the next season, and "The fat years are over" by Hans Weingartner, which was performed in the Gries city theater .

In 2008/09 the classics about power and powerlessness, “Maria Stuart” by Friedrich Schiller and “Liebe Jelena” by Lyudmila Rasumowskaja were shown. The crowd favorite was the successful musical "Cabaret" with which the season ended. Two world premieres were on the program in 2009/10: “Our Chief” , a co-production with Vorarlberger Landestheater and neuebuehnevillach , and “Die Walsche” based on a novel by Joseph Zoderer . The highlight of the season was the final production “ La Cage Aux Folles ” (A Cage Full of Fools), a musical about the travesty artist Zaza.

There were two revivals in the 2010/11 season: the children's play “ The Little Prince ” by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and “Die Walsche” by Zoderer. The winning piece of the Bolzano Author Days 2009 "Rothermunds Pictures" - an art thriller and family tragedy, about freedom and crime, guilt and innocence, pity and violence - premiered. This year there was a guest performance by the Meno Fortas Lithuania theater with the play "Idiotas" by Fyodor Dostoyevsky . Finally the rock musical " Hair " was shown. The “Theater Mobil” project was on the road in South Tyrol's schools this season and the following with the monologue “Klamms Krieg”.

Thomas Seeber announced his last season as director of the United Theaters in Bozen, which premiered in October with Chekhov's “ The Cherry Orchard ”. The usual interplay of classics and new plays, children's and youth theater, cultural night and a final musical, this time “ My Fair Lady ” , continued through this season .

2012: New start at VBB

In 2012 the Vereinigte Bühnen Bolzano celebrated its 20th anniversary with a ceremony and a brief review. But more than a look back, the United Theaters of Bolzano are looking ahead. Thomas Seeber said goodbye as director in the 2011/12 season, but will remain with the VBB as president.

On August 1st, 2012 Irene Girkinger took over the management of VBB. With the change in management, the profile of the largest self-producing theater company in South Tyrol was sharpened again. Nowadays is increasingly placed at the center of theater work. The focus is on socio-political issues - the program now always features moments of critical examination of the past and the present. The background of the young theater maker is partly responsible for the direction of the contemporary. Ten years before her work at VBB in Linz, Salzburg and Vienna, she worked as a dramaturge and production manager.

Since the 2012/13 season, more and more young talents have been promoted - for example by promoting South Tyrolean authors, continuing the youth theater club and working with the Bruneck Theater School . In addition, local artists are brought together with new forces from outside - through the design of the season's themes and the continuation of the “Cult.urnacht” - as well as networking with other regional and national cultural initiatives and theaters strengthened and the local reference to theater work expanded.

The VBB endeavor to show a mix of classics, contemporary pieces, musical theater and cross-genre productions. The VBB want to stimulate socio-political discourse, be a place of social attention and a meeting point for contemporaries.

New topics, modern presentations

“Voll Frisch” started the first season of Irene Girkinger. 2012/13 offered a varied program from classics (“ Much Ado About Nothing ” by Shakespeare, “Dorian Gray” by Oscar Wilde ) to world premieres (the commissioned work “The Suitcase” and the 2011 winning play “foreignstrasse 19”). For the first time in many years, there was no musical at the end of the season. With “The Ballhaus - Dance Through a Century” , a play without words with music was offered. Based on the play “ Le Bal ” by Jean-Claude Penchenat, Maxi Obexer and Roberto Cavosi created the German / Italian “script” of a danced journey through South Tyrol, performed by numerous local and some foreign actors.

The 2013/14 season was “Highly Exciting” and started with the classic “ Tales from the Vienna Woods ” by Ödön von Horváth, which was followed by another: “ Werther ” by Goethe. The children's play “ Heidi ” by Johanna Spyri, which was very successful last year, was taken up again. A commissioned work “Romy's Pool” also celebrated its world premiere this season. It was the 75th anniversary of Option - this served as the starting point for the theater project “Option. Traces of Memory ” . The focus was on contemporary witnesses who told their story together with actors from South Tyrol, musically accompanied by the Musicbanda Franui from East Tyrol. This season came to a close with a contemporary staging of the operetta “ Die Fledermaus ” by Johann Strauss, the first co-production of the VBB with the Haydn Orchestra of Bolzano and Trento .

“Immersed” was the program for the 2014/15 season. Before the in-house productions began, a dance theater production by the Belgian artist ensemble Needcompany was shown in collaboration with transart . At the start of the in-house productions, the resumption of “Option. Traces of Remembrance ”on the program, inspired by sponsors and the state of South Tyrol, as well as the great interest of the South Tyrolean population. A milestone of the season was the world premiere of the successful novel “Stillbach oder die Sehnsucht” by Sabine Gruber . The winning piece of the 2013 Autorentage “Blog und Backhendl” was also premiered in collaboration with the Bruneck Theater School. The youth theater club was also used again with “Punk Rock” by Simon Stephens . The 2014/15 season ended with the musical “ Anatevka ” by Jerry Bock, which raised € 20,975.69 in donations. The sum went to the Volontarius Bozen association to take care of the refugees.

In the 2015/16 season the motto was “Let's go!”.

Web links

46.495595 11.353721Coordinates: 46 ° 29 ′ 44.1 ″ N , 11 ° 21 ′ 13.4 ″ E