Steps Towards Greater Sustainability

In 2021 the Theatertreffen-team raised the question: what is the ecological footprint of planning and staging the festival? This initiated a complex process of learning how to source and evaluate data because the German cultural sector is only just starting to analyse its CO2 emissions. The COVID-19 pandemic meant that purely digital editions had to be developed for the Theatertreffen-festivals in 2020 and 2021. Without a live audience in situ and with 10 selected productions that in many cases were streamed directly from the theatres that produced them, a survey of the last two years seemed unrepresentative. For this reason, the Theatertreffen-team decided to start by looking at the year 2019.

What this analysis aims to do is to identify the environmental impact of the festival’s activities, but also to create a scale by which the own ecological efforts can be measured, in order to make a sustainable theatre and festival operation possible.

Since the Kulturveranstaltungen des Bundes in Berlin GmbH achieved EMAS certification in 2013, the Theatertreffen-team led by Yvonne Büdenhölzer and Katharina Fritzsche has been considering how the festival can be organised in a more ecologically sustainable manner in the long term. For several years now, the catering has been predominantly vegetarian, filtered water is provided in own glass bottles and reduced quantities of merchandise have been produced using sustainable sources. In addition to this, in 2021 the Theatertreffen organised the “Forum Ecological Sustainability in the Theatre / Green Ambassadors” in close collaboration with the AktionsnetzwerkNachhaltigkeit in Kultur und Medien (Network for Action on Sustainability in Culture and the Media), as a place to learn from and with each other.

The need to calculate a CO² footprint for the festival’s activities follows as the next step in the Theatertreffen’s ecological development – one that the team has worked on internally for almost two years.

The Aktionsnetzwerk Nachhaltigkeit in Kultur und Medien not only introduced the Theatertreffen-team to the world of CO² analysis, it also supplied them with its own CO² calculator. To provide a basis for the calculations, the festival’s structure and processes were mapped out in detail.

This defined the numerous sections of the Theatertreffen and represented the connections between them in visual form. The next step was to agree a framework for the aims and investigation of the analysis of 2019. Then the data was collected.

This time-consuming but important exploration of the processes will enable the Theatertreffen to calculate CO² footprints more effectively in future.

The analysis of the 2019 festival edition looks primarily at travel by the jury and the visiting productions plus the smaller impact made by travel by interpreters. These areas were examined as they are directly linked to the selection of the 10 remarkable productions, a section of the programme that occupies a central role in the festival and is also the focus on intense public attention.

The figures include travel by all the members of the jury, the teams for the visiting productions and interpreters (including journeys within the city) by car, plane, train and bus, together with their overnight stays in Berlin. Details of travel by the jury include travel by the seven jurors to view productions throughout the year, and to attend the five jury meetings in Berlin, press conferences and the festival itself in May. The visiting production teams travelled to the festival and for preparatory site visits. The stage sets for the invited productions also had to be transported to Berlin. This footprint, which relates explicitly to the visiting productions, is shown in the figures separately under the heading “freight transport” while the data related to persons is shown under the headings “transport of persons” and “accommodation”. The interpreters only travelled to attend the festival.

The analysis does not include activities related to the Stückemarkt, the International Forum or the entire supplementary programme. Emissions caused by electricity and water usage, waste disposal, audience travel and equipping the festival centre were also not yet included in the analysis for 2019.

Gathering data for a period that has already elapsed brings with it many challenges. By using the claims for travel expenses from the jurors and interpreters, it was possible to track travel in this section of the footprint in some detail. This was not the case for travel by the visiting production teams. The climate analysis only includes those visiting performances whose travel costs were borne by the Theatertreffen. Two of the visiting performances were productions that came from Berlin and as a result no travel costs were incurred by the Theatertreffen. In the cases of two other visiting productions, the data was incomplete because the travel costs were partially borne by external theatres or foundations. Full data was available for the remaining visiting productions. From the data that has been gathered it is nevertheless possible to identify approaches and options which might continue to improve the environmental impact of the festival’s activities in future.

The total CO² footprint of the 2019 festival was 117 tonnes. Freight transport over 11,418 kilometres amounted to 23 tonnes, transporting persons over 463,886 kilometres (including flights) accounted for 64 tonnes. The total of 1,444 overnight stays under the heading “accommodation” resulted in emissions of 30 tonnes.

Making up 47 percent of total emissions (56 tonnes of CO²), travel by the jury had a substantial impact on the overall footprint for 2019 and from now on, particular attention will be paid to the means of transport used.

In order to name the 10 remarkable productions for the 2019 Theatertreffen, the seven jurors viewed 418 productions in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, for which they covered just under 293,000 km. 6 percent of the journeys were by car, 39 percent by plane and 55 percent by train, which resulted in a total of 45 tonnes of CO² being emitted. The following diagrams show the percentage share of the distance travelled by each means of transport that was made up by travel by the jury and how many tonnes of CO² emissions were caused.

Although air travel was clearly used much less than travel by train, 76 percent (34 tonnes) of the CO² emissions can be attributed to flights, whereas train journeys made up a much smaller proportion of 15 percent (7 tonnes).

Even before the analysis was conducted, the Theatertreffen-​team was quite sure that travel by the jury was responsible for most of the emissions and therefore represented the first area to address in order to achieve improvement. The findings confirmed and reinforced the principle of questioning travel behaviour and adopting a more rigorous approach in future. A change of thinking has already taken place since the last analogue edition of the festival in 2019. Since 2020, the Theatertreffen has made consistent efforts to regulate and adapt the rules for travel. The COVID-​19 pandemic also made it possible to view productions digitally as well as live in situ and to manage personal resources and climate concerns more carefully. The edition of the festival in 2022 has reinforced the stricter travel regulations that have been in force since 2020, under which flights are to be avoided if at all possible.

While digital viewings of productions increased, the digital route is not the only solution because the emissions caused by digital streaming, video conferencing, etc. remain unclear. The pandemic also made clear that physical proximity cannot be easily replaced. For this reason, travelling will continue. How that travel is done is the key question, and it has an enormous impact on the festival’s CO² footprint.

The situation is similar with respect to travel by the audience, which will be questioned and recorded along with ticket sales for the 2022 edition of the festival. For the first time, a ticket for the local public transport network is included as part of every theatre ticket, so that the audience can travel to the performance free of charge. By doing this, the Theatertreffen wishes to create an incentive for the public to visit the festival in a way which protects the environment and is stress-​free.

With this first climate audit of the 2019 edition of the festival, the Theatertreffen-​team has begun a complex process that is far from complete. It has focussed on a section of the festival’s activities that has a considerable impact: travel by the jury, interpreters and the visiting productions. It is primarily the visiting productions, together with the freight transport they require, that will make up the majority of the festival’s overall footprint when all the data is gathered in future. By working together with the institutions and ensembles that produce the 10 selected productions, the Theatertreffen hopes to go beyond its own learning process to provide additional motivation for other theatres and institutions and to expedite the search for a theatre and festival system that is more economical in its use of resources.

Effective measures to reduce the own footprint can only be defined once a data-​based assessment of the sources of the own emissions is available. Gathering a complete set of data, including emissions from the other areas of the festival and its streaming activities from 2020, 2021 and beyond, is the next objective the Theatertreffen has set itself.

Data gathering: Susanne Albrecht (Administration, Controlling), Lina Erlenmaier (Organisational Assistant), Katharina Fritzsche (Head of Organisation), Laura Hänel (Administrative Assistant), Marie Speckmann (Student Assistant)

Text: Diana Palm (A member of the Berliner Festspiele team, cultural manager, author and since 2021 Transformation Manager for Sustainable Culture. She produces the blog  eARTh– How arts & culture work for our planet.)

How can theatre sets continue to be used after the last night of the performance they were designed for? Limited storage capacity and, to a certain extent, a lack of systems to re-​assign them lead to most theatrical materials landing in compacters without being reused.

The architect and stage designer  EvaVeronica Born has been actively engaged with the theme of sustainability in theatres and cultural institutions for some time now. Amongst other projects, she has consistently designed the Theatertreffen’s festival centre at the Haus der Berliner Festspiele to be as sustainable as possible since 2015. For the festival’s 2022 edition, she has devised the project “Theatre / Material / Circulation”: Following the Covid-​years 2020 and 2021, the festival centre of the Theatertreffen will be made entirely out of “played out” stage sets and recycled elements from elsewhere which can be passed on after the festival has ended and enter other, new cycles of use.

One of the project’s starting points was director and composer Ari Benjamin Meyers’s theatre production “Forecast” at the VolksbühneBerlin. Meyers and his creative team had been working on this project since 2017. However, as a result of Covid lockdowns and several changes in the management of the theatre, it could never be performed in public. The lavishly produced set designed by Eva Veronica Born was scheduled for disposal in January 2022.

Thanks to the project “Theater / Material / Kreislauf” (Theatre / Material / Circulation) it was possible to buy the set – a construction kit that could be assembled into a house and then dismantled again during the performance – from the Volksbühne Berlin and repurpose it as the Festival Centre for Theatertreffen 2022 in the Haus der Berliner Festspiele garden. The festival will use the “Forecast House” as a visitors’ lounge and also as a venue to present the music from the play in the form of an audio installation. After the Theatertreffen, the “Forecast House” will be hosted by the haubrokfoundation and seen in other contexts. For “Forecast”, which was conceived as a performance about climate change and how resources are wasted, this re-​use gives the project a further life entirely in keeping with its original spirit.

Another stage set that is used for the festival centre design originated with the project “HeartChamber Fragments” by the theatre company Papertiger from Beijing/Berlin, which premiered at the MünchnerKammerspiele in autumn 2021. The production was performed for a six-​week run in Munich but, due to the Covid pandemic, the tour of China planned to follow this was cancelled. The stage set, consisting of high-​quality, universally employable and elaborately manufactured granules was assigned for disposal, even though these granules could be sustainably re-​used as fire-​proof insulation on various construction sites.

The Berliner Festspiele, the Münchner Kammerspiele and Kunst-​Stoffe– Zentralstelle für wiederverwendbare Materialien e.V. then initiated a collaboration between several institutions to organise transport to Berlin and to arrange and co-​ordinate the subsequent re-​use of the materials after the 2022 Theatertreffen. As a result, a large part of the pink granulate will be taken to Kassel for the documentafifteen, where it will be used in an art installation. Other parts will be used as bulk insulation in building projects in the Berlin area, thus returning the material to its original use. At the Volkstheater in Vienna, part of the granulate will be used to create another stage set.

The project “Theatre / Material / Circulation” follows on from Eva Veronica Born’s work in designing the Theatertreffen, which she has conducted on sustainable principles since 2015, incorporating elements from the festival centre for the previous Theatertreffen in her design, changing them and presenting them in a new light. So, for example, the pool of granules in the 2022 festival will be constructed and framed using a labyrinth of wooden planks and brackets designed for Theatertreffen 2017. The enclosed “camp arena” from Theatertreffen 2015 can be found again in 2022 as elongated, brightly-​coloured, stepped seating for the audience in the upper foyer of the festival theatre. The small stackable stools, designed for a series of events at the 2016 Theatertreffen, are scattered all over the campus this year, offering opportunities for spontaneous encounters and exchanges. A wooden footbridge that led into the new main entrance of the Festspielhaus in 2015, which was used for the first time at the time, was transformed into benches for the Theatertreffen 2022, welcoming audience members behind this now established main entrance.

The recycling (pilot) project “Theatre / Material / Circulation” aims to highlight prospects, possibilities, inhibitions and questions about and for treating materials that have served their purpose in theatre and cultural institutions, to challenge these critically and open up new possibilities for the future.

Eva Veronica Born is an architect and stage designer who has designed the festival spaces for the Theatertreffen at the Haus der Berliner Festspiele since 2015 and the Theatertreffen’s official awards since 2016.