Jonas Tinius. State of the Arts: An Ethnography of German Theatre and Migration. (Cambridge University Press)
This is a bold and wide-ranging account of the unique German public theatre system through the prism of a migrant artistic institution in the western post-industrial Ruhr region.
State of the Arts analyses how artistic traditions have responded to social change, racism, and cosmopolitan anxieties and recounts how critical contemporary cultural production positions itself in relation to the tumultuous history of German state patronage, difficult heritage, and self-cultivation through the arts. Jonas Tinius' fieldwork with professional actors, directors, cultural policy makers, and activists unravels how they constitute theatre as a site for extra-ordinary ethical conduct and how they grapple with the pervasive German cultural tradition of Bildung, or self-cultivation through the arts. Tinius shows how anthropological methods provide a way to understand the entanglement of cultural policy, institution-building, and subject-formation. An ambitious and interdisciplinary study, the work demonstrates the crucial role of artistic intellectuals in society. (Description from Cambridge University Press).
Q&A with Jonas Tinius
If your readers take away only one idea from your book, what would you want that idea to be?
Theater, and professional artistic practices more generally, are serious modalities for reflecting on, rethinking, and even prefiguring social and political realities. Whether you are a scholar of anthropology, language and culture, philosophy, or theatre and performance studies – or even a practitioner yourself – we learn a lot from attending to these moments in life where living is condensed, when it becomes “extra-ordinary”. That is what the actors, artists, directors, dramaturgs, teachers, craftsmen (and women) at the heart of my book grappled with and what arguably the long tradition of Bildung in the development of modern German theatre was about.
What work or idea or thinker influenced you the most in the writing of this book?
As an anthropologist, I would have to scale my responses and I cannot give a straightforward academic response. First and foremost, there are the people this books is about: my interlocutors in the Ruhr region and beyond, many of whom have become friends and mentors. Among them, I might have to single out the actor, director, and philosopher Roberto Ciulli, founder and director of the Theater an der Ruhr, and the director Adem Köstereli, who learned the art of theatre from Ciulli and eventually took me under his wings to open this world to me. On a personal level, my late father – a high school teacher and greatest inspiration for me to think about the relation between education and theatre. In an analytical sense, the work of anthropologists Karin Barber, Georgina Born, James Laidlaw, and Roger Sansi pushed me to think the relationship between art and life. German theatre scholar and performer Annemarie (Mieke) Matzke was a great inspiration too for me while thinking about my field.
Books answer questions, but they also raise new questions. What questions does your book raise?
Quo vadis, Germany? No, seriously: I wrote the book with a strong belief in the importance of public funding and the protection of an “autonomous” art field such as theatre to maintain democracy and a self-reflexive public sphere. Just opening my eyes and ears to what is happening to art funding and arts policy pretty much anywhere in the world these days, not least in Germany, makes you wonder whether we have lost a sense of the importance of progressive art patronage. My more serious question is: How can we keep this tradition of critique and self-formation through artistic practice and thought (Bildung, pretty much) alive without musealising it?
What got you interested in the topic of your book?
I was born and grew up in the Ruhr region. My father, born in Oberhausen like I was, taught literature and philosophy in a difficult high school in this region and formed part of a generation of angry and deceived radical intellectuals and educators. For him, the way that literature and philosophy informed theatre was more important than the federal curriculum he was supposed to teach and so he took his students – many of whom refugees and migrants – over more than thirty years to the Theater an der Ruhr. From there on, for me, it was the exposure to anthropology and the subsequent realisation that I could actually spend time with theatre people instead of “just” writing about their work, which sparked my interest in the topic. That’s why I went “back home” from my studies abroad to do fieldwork with theatre practitioners in the Ruhr region.
For those interested in learning more about your topic, what should they turn to next (after having read your book, of course)?
Most importantly: go out there! Go to theatres, public and alternative, watch performances, get involved, get your hands dirty, speak to those that maintain the tradition and institution of theatre. Hang out, deeply (what we anthropologists call fieldwork). But if you want to read, go and check out The Cambridge Guide to Mixed Methods Research for Theatre and Performance Studies edited by Tracy C. Davis and Paul Rae (Cambridge University Press, 2024), Theaterwissenschaft postkolonial/dekolonial edited by Azadeh Sharif and Lisa Skwirblies (transcript, 2022), Institution und Utopie by Tanja Bogusz (transcript, 2015), Dramaturgy: A Revolution in Theatre by Mary Luckhurst (Cambridge University Press, 2009), The Subject of Virtue by James Laidlaw (Cambridge University Press, 2014). There are too many directions to take: Get in touch!