The Neuberin

Year & Context

1998 / 1999

In cooperation with FH Dortmund · ICEM Essen

About the Production

“Here is something for you to listen to. Not something from the mouth of an educated and wise man; no! Only from a woman, whose name you found written outside, and whose social status you must look for below the lowest strata: Because she is nothing more than a comedian!”

— Friederike Caroline Neuber, program text “The Neuberin”, TdK 1999

There are figures who do not merely make theater history — they are theater history — and yet are forgotten by it. Friederike Caroline Neuber, known as “Die Neuberin,” is one of them. A Saxon burgher’s daughter of the early eighteenth century, she flees her father, joins the itinerant players and becomes the most significant theater director of her time: Principaless of her own troupe, reformer of the German stage, collaborator of Gottsched, contemporary of Bach and Lessing — and, in the end, a woman who loses everything.

Her significance lies not in what she achieves for herself, but in what she makes possible for others. The path from marketplace farce to enlightened civic theater, from wandering troupes to permanent institutions — all of this bears the Neuberin’s mark. Lessing, Goethe, Schiller: they all stand on a foundation laid by a woman whose name hardly anyone knows.

The Theater der Klänge approached this figure through years of work – from 1997 to 1999. The text was developed in collaboration between the actor Clemente Fernandez and the director Jörg U. Lensing: 24 scenes spanning the Neuberin’s life from her nineteenth year to her death, three and a half hours sustained by music, dance, video and spoken theater. Critics described “theatre bursting with life” (Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger), a text composed “like a score” (Die Deutsche Bühne), and an evening “rich in thought-provoking aesthetic sentences and historic parallels” (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung). The world premiere took place on January 7, 1999, at Tanzhaus NRW Düsseldorf; performances followed in Essen, Cologne and – in a condensed version – in Gotha, Weimar and Zwickau, at the very places where the Neuberin herself had worked, as well as a staged reading at the Neuberin-Museum in Reichenbach (Vogtland), Friederike Caroline Neuber’s birthplace. A piece about theater that takes itself as its own subject: space and text as fundamental questions, argued through the fate of a woman who gave her life for both.

Funded by the City of Düsseldorf (production and venue subsidies), the State of North Rhine-Westphalia / Theater Department of the Ministry of Labour, Social Affairs, Culture and Sport (ensemble funding), the NRW Ministry of Science and Research (“Multimedia and Art” research group) and the “van Meeteren” Foundation. In cooperation with ICEM at Folkwang University of the Arts, Essen, and the University of Applied Sciences Dortmund.