Until relatively recently, melodrama has been an unfairly maligned genre of theatre history; its pejorative associations based on the prejudiced assumptions that its aesthetics of excess (in terms of its extravagant emotion, sensationalism and popularity amongst predominantly working class audiences) meant, therefore, that it was for simpletons. What Walter Benjamin excoriated as the “ancient lament that the masses seek distraction whereas art demands concentration from the spectator” fuelled bourgeois disdain for this theatrical form and the derision of the Theatrical Inquisitor’s dismissal of melodrama as “aris[ing] from an inertness in the minds of the spectators, and a wish to be amused without the slightest exertion on their own parts, or any exercise whatever of their intellectual powers” remained the dominant critical response throughout the nineteenth century. Indeed, such views continued well into the twentieth century and certainly characterized the modernist reactions of the founding figures of the Irish national theatre in this period. Frank Fay, cofounder of the National Dramatic Society, denounced both the aesthetics of Dublin's Queen's Theatre as the “home of the shoddiest kind of melodrama,” and the intelligence of its audiences who, “wouldn't, at present, understand anything else.”

When Horace wrote in Ars Poetica, “If you would have me weep, you must first feel grief yourself” (“Si vis me flere dolendum est primum ipsi tibi”), he expressed the ancient world's view that, in order to emotionally affect his audience, an orator needed to feel the emotion himself. This idea was widely subscribed to in the eighteenth century. In the modern era Konstantin Stanislavsky engaged in a sustained investigation of emotion and acting, stressing that the actor needed to experience “real feeling” in order for the audience to experience authentic emotions also. As a theory of emotional transmission, it seems like common sense. Yet, when Denis Diderot witnessed in Baron d'Holbach's salon David Garrick's parlor trick of sticking his head out between two screens, and cycling through a range of passions with his face, the great philosophe wondered whether the actor felt anything at all even though his audience, including Baron Grimm, evidently did. “Can his soul have experienced all these feelings, and played this kind of scale in concert with his face?” Diderot asked, and then answered, “I don't believe it; nor do you.” By deciding in the negative, that Garrick could not have felt anything, Diderot reveals a common fallacy of the audience: the belief that what an audience feels reflects, and is a result of, what an actor feels. The problem for Diderot, which he addressed in the Paradox of Acting (1773), was how an actor such as Garrick managed to evoke emotions in his audience when he apparently felt nothing himself.

It is 7 November 1904, 7:55 p.m. New York City theatregoers anxiously await the opening of George M. Cohan's newest production, Little Johnny Jones. The house is just about filled, but the well-dressed ushers hustle a few stragglers to their seats. Some of the theatre's usual patrons have been held up late at work, while others are too consumed by Clifford Berryman's political cartoons in the Washington Star to attend the performance. This particular Monday evening marks an important moment for America: polls for the thirtieth presidential election will be opening in fewer than twelve hours. Theodore Roosevelt represents the Republican Party, and Alton B. Parker heads the Democratic ticket. Although results will not be known for sure until the close of the 8 November election, Roosevelt's recent success in office upon the assassination of William McKinley gives him a political boost. New York City's predominantly Republican values leave little doubt about which name a majority of tonight's audience will be checking off on the ballot come morning; Roosevelt has carried every region but the South in his campaigning efforts thus far. Nonetheless, Broadway occasionally attracts a few guests from the slightly less liberal states of Maryland and Pennsylvania, and this evening's house is no different; the Liberty Theatre is filled with men of opposing political views. A nervous excitement fills the room; a combination of political gossip, predictions about how Cohan's first Broadway musical will compare to his earlier comedic works and vaudeville skits, and occasional gasps and awestruck sighs from spectators who are seeing the inside of the Liberty Theatre for the first time since its very recent grand opening at 234 West 42nd Street. The twenty-thousand-square-foot theatre, with its dramatic stage, extensive balconies, and striking cathedrallike ceilings is the perfect home for the unfolding of Broadway, a theatrical form and style that America will come to call its own. As the house lights dim and the violins hum a piercing A note, other members of the orchestra slowly begin tuning their individual instruments. As the oboists finish adjusting their pitch, the conductor taps his music stand: musicians tilt their gaze to the front of the pit, audience members sink into the velvet of their plush seats and begin to quiet their chatter. Blackout.

In her 1964 essay “Notes on ‘Camp,’” Susan Sontag includes Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake (1875–6) in a list that illustrates “random examples” from “the canon of Camp.” Though the ballet has become an integral part of the classical repertory for professional companies from Moscow to New York to Sydney as well as the inspiration for numerous figure skaters (most notoriously in Johnny Weir's outré and rhinestone-bedecked interpretation in 2006), it has, as suggested by Sontag, been creative afflatus for gay underground performers for more than a century. But what are the origins of the swan gone queer? As this article demonstrates, I suggest that one way to trace both the swan's queer genealogy and its continuity lies in the dramatic history and lived performance of the ill-fated Ludwig II (hereafter “Ludwig”) of Bavaria (1845–86)—the Swan King (Fig. 1). Tchaikovsky, after all, had been inspired by the dramatic story of the effete young king (and perhaps titillated by a shared closeted gay desire), who would become a prototype for the ballet's tragic hero, Prince Siegfried. In fact, dance scholar Peter Stoneley suggests that “Swan Lake confirms the virtual impossibility, in Tchaikovsky's [and Ludwig's] era, of accommodating homosexuality within wider society.” Ludwig's desire was expressed through a lens of his same-sex fantasies and their inspired artistic interpretations, most notably taking form in the construction of his neo-Romanesque, fairy-tale castle Neue Burg Hohenschwangau (more commonly known as Neuschwanstein or New Swan on the Rock Castle, though it was not renamed until after Ludwig's death). Ludwig's queer positionality also arises from the theatrical way that he performed a highly aesthetic (though hardly effective) approach to monarchy with his swan-bedecked castle and its environs as a sort of metastage set. In this context, the swan may be read as an example of what Donna Haraway calls “a companion species,” or a personal animal symbol (real or mythical) that represents a variety of feelings that are otherwise difficult to express in the hegemonic context of a given time and place (like homosexuality in Roman Catholic Bavaria in the nineteenth century). Ludwig chose the swan (drawn from family heraldry but primarily envisioned in his own life through storybook-driven fantasy) as a means of alternative expression to that normally available to a man in his position and with his responsibilities, and also as a way to enact his forbidden desires.

There is so much to say about the persistent critiques of and mobilizations against Chris Dercon's vision (or lack thereof) of the newly named Volksbühne Berlin. My task here, however, is a different one: to begin to understand why there has also been such persistent mobilization on behalf of the Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz. In what follows, I provide some critical context for reflection upon the unique role the Volksbühne played in post-Wall Berlin. I suggest that in his twenty-five-year tenure at the Volksbühne, Frank Castorf worked to refunction the theatre apparatus itself, to transform the theatre as state institution, as interrelated set of supporting structures that extend beyond and behind the proscenium arch. Further, Castorf's work as both director and artistic director helps us to understand the complex relations between a theatre aesthetic, which exposes and critiques the structures of its (state) support, and a theatrical institution with similarly ambitious goals. As an aesthetic and as an infrastructural project, Castorf's Volksbühne enacted a new kind of public theatre in Berlin—and it is this project of institutional dis/avowal that we must remember (and dare to reenact) as so much more than reactionary or provincial nostalgia.

When Tim Renner, then secretary of state for cultural affairs in Berlin, announced in March 2015 that Frank Castorf's term as artistic director of the Volksbühne would end in 2017, his reasoning was clear. After twenty-five years, it was time to “develop the Volksbühne further,” to “rethink” where this storied theatre would go next. As the agent of change, Renner had identified Chris Dercon, then still director of London's Tate Modern—a highly regarded museum director with decades of experience as a curator, and none as a theatre maker.

B6112 is a collective anticapitalist, feminist, antiracist, and queer transmedial theatre production. Welcome to our artwork! Our theatre, our art, our poetry, and our work are weapons of struggle. Art does not take place in a political, social, or economic vacuum. Art takes place in world structured by imperialism and its slaughter, war, destruction, commerce, and slavery. Art must engage with this in both content and form. Otherwise it is obsolete. B6112 advocates a theatre that calls for revolution, reveals relationships of domination, denounces grievances, names guilty parties, presents resistance strategies, explores them, rejects them. B6112 stands for the elimination of nationalisms and gender inequality, for a global citizenship, for a world community in which all people peacefully coexist in equal living conditions. B6112 stands for self-organization and emancipation, for a hierarchy-free theatre that has a mimetic and thus exemplary effect on society. In the face of global disasters, we reject an entertainment theatre or a theatre of display that acts as an opiate in the society. Only when our goals have been achieved will we be able to renegotiate the role of the theatre for our society, redefine its content, and redefine the question of relevance.

The decision to appoint Chris Dercon, director of the Tate Modern, as Frank Castorf's successor at the Volksbühne prompted an exodus of the theatre's core artistic ensemble. Chief among those who refused to stay on with Dercon at the helm was the prodigious writer and director René Pollesch.