Panel Discussion — How Does Theater Confront a Volatile World After Brecht_

Expanding on earlier discussions on Brecht, panelists Sahar Rahimi, Oliver Reese, Noah Willumsen, and Han-jin Chen pivoted toward the contemporary. Amidst perpetual geopolitical and technological volatility, they interrogated whether Brecht’s legacy remains a repository of classic texts or an active methodology for deciphering the present.

Sahar Rahimi contextualized the systemic precarity facing exiled creators. Drawing a direct lineage to Brecht’s own displacement, she emphasized that the contemporary Brechtfestival seeks to provide visibility for artists currently living in exile.

Rahimi noted the institutional and psychological friction of navigating alien states, rebuilding language abilities, and integrating into unfamiliar societies. For contemporary Iranian artists, the geopolitical climate has rendered artistic production nearly impossible.

"People have reached a point where they can no longer produce art."

For Rahimi, Brechtian exile is not a distant historical artifact; it is an ongoing, daily reality.

The transition to digital media has introduced acute challenges for cultural preservation. Oliver Reese observed that the traditional paper archive has effectively vanished. Creative processes are now mediated entirely through digital computation, yielding multiple, fluid iterations daily. Drawing on his 40-year tenure in theaters, Reese argued that because theatrical labor is now highly digitized, the core archiving strategy must shift toward documenting the evolutionary process in real-time.

Noah Willumsen expanded on this technological vulnerability, noting the material degradation of media: physical CDs from the 1990s are becoming unreadable, and DVDs are projected to fail systemically within the decade. The physical mediums themselves are rapidly evaporating. While half-jokingly suggesting that artificial intelligence might offer future solutions, Rahimi issued a crucial counterpoint: artists must remain vigilant in preserving their own primary documentation and texts. The assets most vulnerable to erasure are often the peripheral traces that constitute actual creative trajectories.

In the latter half of the discussion, Taiwanese theater practitioner Wei-lian Wang shifted the focus toward the evolution of actors, examining how acting techniques and company structures have mutated over the past decade to accommodate a new generation of performers from diverse backgrounds.

Reese responded that the theater has always operated in a state of rapid adaptation, historically positioning cinema as its primary competitor. While the German theatrical landscape traditionally relied on the permanent ensemble model, which featured fixed rosters of actors under long-term contracts, contemporary performances have fundamentally broken away from this structure.

Reese highlighted the proliferation of gender-bending and multi-role casting as standard contemporary strategies. The historical practice of male actors portraying female characters has shifted; today, female actors frequently occupy male roles. Furthermore, singular actors navigating multiple personas within a single production have become normalized. Brechtian epics originally scored for over twenty characters are now routinely executed by a radically condensed cast.

Reese noted that the contemporary class of young directors possesses an entirely recalibrated sensory background, reared within the architectures of TikTok, ubiquitous internet connectivity, AI, and hyper-saturated visual culture. This shift has delivered a profound shock to traditional theatrical forms, forcing institutions to restructure their mediums.

While Rahimi conceded that these stylistic mutations are undeniable, she argued that the essential potency of theater resides in its spatial exclusivity: the moment actors and audiences occupy the same physical coordinates, they are temporarily liberated from digital saturation and external noise.

Even when confronted by a hyper-mediated environment, theater retains its defining characteristics—the phenomenon of collective co-presence. Consequently, the panel concluded that the enduring interrogation leaves Brecht's texts behind to address a more fundamental question: how theater preserves human experience within an era of accelerating technological, political, and material transformation.

Moving from East German state archives and displaced artists to the TikTok generation of performers, Brecht’s ultimate legacy is not an archive of objects, but a relentless interrogation: in a world defined by constant flux, what remains on stage forever?