The actor and neo-director of the Tiroler Volksschauspiele in Telfs, Gregor Bloéb, has described the activist Woke movement as “bourgeois” and “fascistoid”. When it comes to art, this “bubble” tends towards mediocrity and petty bourgeoisie, while a “theater for natural instincts” is important to him, in which primeval human conflicts are to be negotiated. “Under my directorship, the theater and art should simply touch everyone,” he said in the APA interview.
Because art as a whole is currently “already removed and separated from people” to a large extent, explained Bloéb. The theater, for example, should by no means be a “kind of secret language” for a select audience. So if many theaters in Austria are currently half-empty, it would also be due to the way theater is made: “Many topics there just serve their own bubble.”
He himself, on the other hand, wants to see “normal citizens” and young people in the performances once more: “For me, it’s regarding a great deal of togetherness, regarding exchange, regarding what we have in common.” The aim should therefore be a “bubble-free space for everyone,” said Bloéb. “That’s why I consciously include the Tyrolean subculture and end the festival with a concert by the Viennese rapper Yung Hurn.”
In general, he is concerned with the “tangible and concrete,” said the actor. “It’s definitely no longer enough that art only creates imaginary spaces and holds up whatever mirror to society.” It is much more important that “art belongs to the people once more”, that there is an exchange following the performance and that as many different people as possible “acquire culture”.
Incidentally, the desired “freedom from a bubble” in one’s own actions and work in Telfs also extends to one’s own family. “I didn’t want to involve Tobias and my wife Nina right away in the first season,” he emphasized. The integration of the two will take place in the future more “on request” and if there are actually pieces that practically demand the acting of the two.
Much more than thinking regarding big names, however, he is driven by the question of “artistic and human survival strategies”. “It’s all shit at the moment,” Blóeb said. But that’s exactly why you have to do something and act: “It needs these very concrete cultural places and utopias that are different from the world.” In any case, the formula “shit plus X” applies to him, stated the Volksschauspiele director. “The art, your own actions, that’s the crucial X at the moment.”