Perfection

For what felt like a quarter of a century, Berlin, with its seemingly inexhaustible resources of space and time, was an experimental stage for people from all over the world. Urban open spaces, even remnants of moving history, were discovered as temporary galleries, party locations and cheap living space and were transformed over time into interchangeable surfaces and objects of speculation with freshly painted facades. Not only vacant properties, but also their residents and visitors, who were allowed to upgrade fallow buildings with their cultural capital for a short period of time.

Vincenzo Latronico's novel The Perfections, nominated for the Booker Prize last year, focuses on Anna and Tom. They came here from southern Europe in the mid-noughties to escape the confines of their homeland. Attracted by digitally generated designs that promise self-actualization and an idealized form of contemporaneity, they must increasingly come to terms with the fact that such images dissolve just as they begin to become reality.

The city is becoming a scene of loneliness and transcendental homelessness: Freedom and self-fulfillment seem within reach at all times. At the same time, the actors have lost every meaningful connection between the individual, the world and history. In Anna and Tom's world of experiences, past, present and future become blurred. Just like the “East” and “West” of Berlin. Were the promises of tailor-made life plans for individuality just the beginning of adaptation to a new uniformity?

Three years after Anna and Tom, the Munich-born director Anta Recke also moved to Berlin in 2007 to live there and graduate from school. Today, she is one of the most distinctive voices in German-language contemporary theatre, known for haunting pictorial worlds and bold conceptual settings.

For her production Perfection, Recke, together with visual artist and architect Marta Dyachenko, designed an arena in which the viewing angles of everyone present can move freely. As an alternative to carefully curated Instagram realities, the theatre presents itself as a place of meeting where the person stares back, of course.

The Prater on Kastanienallee itself — with its history as a former folk theatre and as the subject of a real estate dispute — becomes an independent meta-stage image for the staging of Perfection. The Prater was closed for ten years due to renovation. It is now completely renovated, a reconstruction and a museum piece of a lost world. It is 2026 and the Volksbühne is now returning to the memorable building. Who else is there? Who left long ago? Who is coming? And with regard to Berlin and Germany as a whole: Who is still allowed to come today and in the future?