Abstract

This chapter examines Schlingensief’s temporal, creative intervention into the experiences of an underprivileged section of Hamburg’s urban population, whose destitute circumstances he viewed as a social ‘staging’ or production. The meeting point for this marginalized group, located across the road from a major theatre at Hamburg’s main station led Schlingensief to confront and challenge the theatre’s lack of engagement with the pressing social issues literally found on its doorstep. Schlingensief identified the theatre – to which he had been invited – as a site of social exclusion and rejected it as a venue in which to rehearse and premiere a new work. Instead he sought to encourage the participation of socially marginalized groups in the form of activist-style events in the public arena. The chapter sets out Schlingensief’s interventions in Hamburg and their unexpected consequences and then turns to the framework of social dramaturgy as set out by Erving Goffman in order to analyse Schlingensief’s direct intervention into what constitutes conventionally mainstream theatre practice, which underscores his confrontational relationship with this particular social institution.