Epoch Theater: the Climate Crisis on the German Stage
Skies, Deutsches Theater Berlin)
In cooperation with the Heinrich Böll Foundation in Washington D.C. and the Department of Theater Arts and the CAST program at Brandeis, the Center for German and European Studies (CGES) is preparing a special photography exhibition for Fall 2026 entitled Epoch Theater: the Climate Crisis on the German Stage. This exhibition brings together photographic works documenting contemporary theater productions in Germany that engage the climate crisis through the legacy of Bertolt Brecht and the methods of epic theater. Rather than presenting climate change as catastrophe alone or as a distant abstraction measured only through graphs, targets, and forecasts, the exhibition approaches climate as a social relation: historical, material, political, and staged.
The selected productions draw from Brechtian strategies not simply as aesthetic references, but as tools for perception. Epic theater sought to interrupt passive spectatorship. It aimed to make the familiar appear strange, to expose the structures underlying everyday life, and to transform the audience from consumers of narrative into observers of systems. Climate change presents a similar challenge. It is difficult to perceive directly. We encounter weather, infrastructure, consumption, migration, labor, and extraction, but rarely the total system that binds them together.
Photography occupies a particular position within this encounter. Theater is ephemeral; performance disappears. The photograph arrests gesture, relation, and staging. Removed from the continuity of dramatic time, these images become sites of analysis rather than immersion. They preserve not only scenes, but methods of seeing.
The exhibition is therefore organized not chronologically, nor by company or production, but through four “episodes” derived from key principles within Brechtian performance theory: Adaptation, Interruption, Gesture, and Ensemble. Each episode proposes a different way of understanding both climate politics and theatrical form.
Adaptation examines how bodies, landscapes, and institutions are compelled to reorganize themselves under conditions of environmental transformation. In these works, adaptation is not framed as resilience rhetoric or technocratic management, but as a lived condition shaped unevenly by power, labor, geography, and historical responsibility. The productions ask who is expected to adapt, and to what.
Interruption draws from the Brechtian break: the refusal of seamless narrative and emotional absorption. These photographs capture moments where theatrical continuity fractures through projection, direct address, exposed machinery, abrupt shifts in tone, or visible stage construction. Such interruptions mirror the disruptions of climate crisis itself: floods, shortages, migration, infrastructural breakdown, and political rupture. But they also interrupt ideology, exposing the supposedly “natural” systems of extraction and consumption as contingent and constructed.
Gesture focuses on the Brechtian Gestus: the social gesture through which relations of power become legible. Here, the body becomes an archive of climate politics. A posture, a look, a repetitive movement, a collective choreography: these reveal forms of labor, precarity, resistance, exhaustion, care, and dependency. Climate change appears not only as environmental condition, but as something inscribed onto bodies and social relations.
Finally, Ensemble turns toward collectivity. Against the individualized narratives that often dominate climate discourse, these works foreground coordination, interdependence, and shared presence. Ensemble does not imply harmony. Brechtian collectivity is often unstable, conflicted, and unfinished. Yet these productions insist that climate politics cannot be understood solely through individual morality or consumption. They emerge instead through infrastructures, institutions, solidarities, and forms of common action.
Across all four episodes, the exhibition asks how theater, and particularly the Brechtian tradition within German performance culture, can help render climate change perceptible as a historical and political condition rather than merely an environmental one. The photographs do not document solutions. They document acts of staging: attempts to rehearse new ways of seeing systems that otherwise remain diffuse, normalized, or hidden.
In this sense, the exhibition does not seek immersion. It seeks attention. Like epic theater itself, it invites viewers not only to witness the world, but to recognize that it has been made and, therefore, might be made otherwise.
The exhibit will be on view upstairs in Farber Library from late August 2026 through November. For more information, contact Sabine von Mering at vonmering@brandeis.edu. There are a number of events in the works that will be in conjunction with the exhibit. Check back soon!