Radical budget cuts in the cultural sector of the Netherlands have caused disquiet and debates about high culture even in Germany. However, do we really need what the German punk poet Rainald Goetz once sneeringly called “Kulturverteidigung” (“defence of culture”)? Or should we rather develop a whole new concept of culture? A new term that is guided by questions of production and cooperation, rather than antiquated needs of representation? Such questions are asked by independent theatre maker Alexander Karschnia in his article on protests in the cultural arena in Italy and Holland. His performance group andcompany&Co. has resided in the Netherlands for many years. Together with Dutch and Belgian collaborators they developed a new piece on the topic:

CULTURAL COUNTERREVOLUTION GAINING GROUND
“Through car-free streets I walk to the Odéon. A young man in the centre aisle of the theatre is leading the discussion. An amazing experience, still: Someone is speaking from one of the golden boxes, handsome and serious faces, finally no longer bored, turn into that direction, arguments are streaming back and forth in the world’s longest dialogue, which has now been going on for days around the clock. (…) Never again, not even when this will be past, will this theatre be a ‘normal’ theatre for me, because this scene is unforgettable.”

Paris, May, 1968, described by Cees Nooteboom for a Dutch newspaper. For several weeks, revolting students had occupied the Théâtre de l’Odéon and used it as a gathering place. Rome, June, 2011, a similar scene: Rome’s most ancient extant house, the Teatro Valle, was occupied by Lavoratrici e Lavoratori dello Spettacolo (male and female workers of the theatre: actors, directors, designers, stage callers, light board operators, sound engineers) demanding to preserve the famous theatre house. Founded in 1727 as a concert stage, it saw the first performance of Pirandello’s Six Persons are Looking for an Author 90 years ago. The play’s experimental dramaturgy laid the founding stone for a new era of Italian theatre. For 60 years, the theatre had been controlled by the national authority Ente Teatrale Italiano (ETI), which had ultimately opted for privatisation, prior to its own dissolution. In June, it was taken over by its staff: “All of them together keep a theatre going which has not had any official managing director since the beginning of June,” Spiegel online wrote. Protests were voiced by more than 8000 citizens and international theatre makers, including Thomas Ostermeier from Germany. In the course of summer, nearly the entire cultural establishment of Italy joined the protest: it is ironical that precisely on the 150th anniversary of Italy’s national unification, a theatre that would be eminently suitable for a ‘national theatre’ is for sale. Occupants and their supporters demand a publicly funded house with transparent operating structures, dedicated to developing contemporary dramaturgies and to teaching and training, which is capable of realizing international co-productions, like the Royal Court Theatre in London, the Theatre de la Colline in Paris or Berlin’s Schaubühne. An ‘ecological principle’ is wanted, “between small and big productions, training and guest performances; fairness of wages, including fixed minimum and maximum wages; an affordable and progressive policy with regard to admission fees; independent supervisory bodies, transparency and legality through online publication of balances; drafting an ethical codex as a model for all theatre houses and groups in Italy.” And – hopefully – beyond!

Italian civil society had already rejected nuclear power as well as the privatisation of water and the legal special treatment of politicians this year; now Roman theatre workers declared culture a ‘common wealth’, and “free access to culture, knowledge, freedom in distributing ideas and the strengthening of critical thinking an essential component of civil rights.” In principle, we may agree with this, yet we need to ask whether the theatres they mention as examples really achieve this. The Art Workers’ Document by another group of Italian curators, artists, and activists goes further. Attempting to analyse their situation within the framework of general transformations of the welfare state, which after all was also a ‘cultural state’, they warn against the widening gap between the public sphere and the sphere of cultural production. Their demand to reform this state goes far beyond the demand for state-funding and de-privatisation: it is this cooperative and collective dimension of their work which must be respected and actively protected, instead of mechanically reciting the neoliberal harangue of self-responsibility, creativity, flexibility, and mobility. This is precisely what is happening at Teatro Valle every night, when its doors open for meetings, discussions, and performances, partly by prominent artists such as Bernardo Bertolucci, Nanni Moretti, and many more, who declare their solidarity. Occupants were delighted during the summer: “Already, we are over Berlusconi…”

This is what occupants of the Odéon were thinking back then, too: after many nights of fighting on the barricades, overwhelming mass protests by students and workers and a wild general strike, which had brought the country to a halt for almost a month, nobody would have imagined that the ‘General’ (de Gaulle) who had fled the country would score this high in the elections a few weeks later. But the points of departure in France, 1968 and Rome, 2011 are very different: while l’Odéon was chosen as a meeting place during a whole series of occupations of universities and businesses, the occupation of the theatre house in Rome is a singular event. An event, however, that could be the prelude to a new social cultural movement – in all of Europe and beyond. For the field of culture is as fiercely contested as never before. We are indebted to the Italian Antonio Gramsci for his concept of &lsquo