“Nothing is fundamentally certain”
Artistic director Shermin Langhoff finds new stage designs in Berlin.
As soon as she began her first job as artistic director at Berlin’s Maxim Gorki Theatre for the 2013/2014 season, Shermin Langhoff announced: “I’m not interested in art that doesn’t struggle for social changes.” She has kept her word and created a new stage for societal diversity with an intercultural ensemble dealing with topics like home and identity – often using dazzling colours and sounds. Polemical, unconventional, exciting: she staged Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard as a Russian-German-Turkish comedy that made fun of cultural stereotypes. In the play Common Ground, the stage was shared by actors from the former war enemies Serbia and Bosnia-Herzegovina.
Langhoff, who was born in Bursa, is the first Turkish director at a major German theatre. She has coined the term “postmigrant theatre”, which she has opened up for actors and directors from immigrant families. She interprets this concept as an invitation to discuss the question of the new societal “we”: “Nothing is fundamentally certain: what is true today is wrong tomorrow. And we are forever renegotiating what we see. We don’t like to be named or categorised.”
