Panel Discussion III — Why does theater remain significant_ From Brecht to modern day_ How theater confronts an age of schism

In this final session, joined by Noah Willumsen, Sahar Rahimi, and Yi-wei Keng, they extended themes from earlier lectures, weaving together threads of Brechtian copyright economics, modern socio-political polarization, and the vital function of the stage in contemporary society.

Willumsen noted that, unlike novels, theories, or texts, theater is a volatile medium that resists being "fixed" or permanently contained. While written copyright eventually expires, theater demands continuous re-animation by new directors, new actors, and changing eras.

The dialogue shifted to a critical audience inquiry regarding how modern theater handles violence. Rahimi acknowledged this as one of the most perilous contradictions on the contemporary stage. The audience raised the historical example of performance artist Chris Burden, who infamously had himself shot in the arm with a rifle, to illustrate how performance can aggressively blur the line between calculated art and raw reality.

Yi-wei Keng expanded on this, noting that such extreme works trigger deep psychological anxiety in the crowd: Is the actor genuinely taking drugs on stage? Have they actually lost consciousness? This lack of certainty is what destabilizes the audience, exposing the raw, messy border where lived reality meets calculated showmanship.

Whether the bullet is real is secondary. The true mechanism at work is that the audience can no longer remain passive outsiders; they are involuntarily implicated, forced to participate in the performance and navigate their own moral judgment.

In Germany, as Willumsen pointed out, the stage has long played a crucial role as a public cultural property. Under the heavy hand of East German (DDR) censorship, the theater was a rare sanctuary where political truths could be smuggled out through coded metaphors and whispers. But our modern crisis is different. It’s not about finding a place for political art; it's about whether we've lost the basic collective will to look each other in the eye.

Willumsen raised a provocative question: By constantly staging these raw democratic debates, is modern theater actually driving a wedge deeper between opposing factions in the audience?

For Rahimi, wrestling with this fragmentation is the core mandate of her curatorial work at the Brechtfestival Augsburg. The goal is to open the doors to everyone, but she warns against confusing inclusion with comfort. The theater should never be a soothing, conflict-free "safe space." Its true power lies in its capacity to hold room for friction, offense, and raw discomfort.

The real question modern theater must answer is whether it can keep us in our seats. When people feel provoked or fundamentally insulted, will they still walk away? Will they show up for the next act, ready to participate?

To close the session, moderator Yi-wei Keng offered a tongue-in-cheek analogy to illustrate the precarious position of art: if a student wants to protest against their school today, they simply shave their head. The administration instantly registers that someone has shaved their head, even if nothing changes in school policy. The audience erupted in laughter, but the point hit home: art and theater might not directly solve systemic crises, but it remains a fiercely courageous act of articulation.

Bringing the focus back to Taiwan, Keng noted that while the post-Martial Law era brought hard-won freedom of speech, society simultaneously drifted into a highly partisan, camp-based matrix. Driven by algorithmic social media feeds, people have become conditioned toward rapid, binary, and extreme positioning.

Theater, by contrast, offers a radical brick-and-mortar alternative. It is a physical sanctuary where individuals with hostile ideological stances must sit in the same room and endure the same duration of time together. This capacity to "co-experience time" is precisely why the stage remains indispensable in an information-saturated age that desperately needs to slow down, as Keng beautifully concluded:

"When AI, predictive algorithms, and social media feeds relentlessly drive the world toward faster, simplified judgments, human thought naturally flattens. Theater stands as one of the last remaining zones that actively permits complexity. It refuses to rush toward an easy resolution or sanitize systemic contradictions. This shared endurance of time and thought is increasingly impossible to find in daily life, and that’s what makes theater irreplaceable."