The traditional institutional split between theatrical organizations devoted to the “fictional” and mass media devoted to the “factual” is being challenged in German theatre. The move to the “postfictional” involves an institutional shift that affects theatre as a medium, and has provoked political and public resistance.

How can we conceive potentiality as the inherent future in any present as well as in any past? Contemporary examples of a “theatre of potentiality” include works by dancer and choreographer Fabrice Mazliah; director Felix Rothenhäusler; and author, performer, director, and theoretician Boris Nikitin, who all share an interest in a-human excess: of things, words, bodies, and fictions.

The controversial performances of Jonathan Meese and the duo Vegard Vinge and Ida Müller uncouple the presumed alliance between fascist politics and aesthetics. Provocatively repurposing fascist iconography and thought, Meese and Vinge/Müller defend art’s autonomy against the contamination of reality and reimagine how contemporary artists grapple with Germany’s past.

Monster Truck’s performances reproduce power dynamics that are at once painful and hurtful. By staging the representational process of dehumanizing black bodies, Monster Truck applies a different strategy than other Freie Szene groups: shining a bright light on dark discourse, selling the audience’s own willing consumption of neocolonial power relationships back to them as art.

A recent trend in Black German theatre engages with fantasy and posthumanism to criticize German racism and nationalism. In Krieg der Hörnchen (War of the Squirrels), Simone Dede Ayivi combines posthumanism and postnationalism, using German fears of invasive gray squirrels taking over the habitat of native red squirrels to reimagine xenophobic and racist debates about migration.

Theatre music has been a key driver of theatrical invention, innovation, and style since 2010 in German theatre and arguably for some years before that. This is evidenced in creative partnerships between individual directors and composers (and sometimes bands), in a strong presence of music in the rehearsal rooms, in musical forms of postdramatic writing, and in forms of acting styles and performance aesthetics where music plays a formative role.

Like most of Yael Ronen’s theatre, Roma Armee complicates notions of identity. It presents a world in which representation simultaneously blinds and illuminates. Ronen’s use of stereotypes deconstructs prevalent images of Roma and Romani Travellers to start a process of healing and reconciliation that recognizes actual experience.

With his reinvention of absurd farce, Herbert Fritsch has become one of the most celebrated directors in the German-speaking world. Most remarkable are Fritsch’s original pieces, which he also designs, composed in collaboration with actors and musicians. These defy generic categorization and allow audiences to rethink what is possible to see and hear onstage.

By presenting the supposedly “nostalgic” and “traditional” genre operetta as a genderfuck spectacle, without opera singers and with queer icons and dancers instead, “gay Jewish kangaroo” Barrie Kosky has revolutionized popular musical theatre in Berlin and brought operetta back to its pre-1933 roots.

Three recent anthologies in science and technology studies show how standards for scholarly professionalization are changing. Such changes may facilitate new alliances for theatre faculty plagued by old feuds and the increasingly neoliberal university.