In David Levine’s BAUERNTHEATER (2007), an American method actor, who knows no German, trained to play a German farmer in a German play. After a month’s rehearsal in a Brooklyn studio, he was flown to the Biorama-Projekt Center in Brandenburg, Germany, given a hectare of land, and asked to be “in character” for 10 hours a day, for an entire month. Taking up issues of global labor markets, the representation of labor, representation as labor, and the relationship of endurance to authenticity, the project earned notoriety through extensive coverage in the American and German press, most notably the New York TImes, TDR, Theater Heute, Freitag, and Die Ziet.

The BAUERNTHEATER catalogue is a guide to major threads of the project. It includes essays by German theater critic Thomas Irmer, american curator and art historian Maika Pollack, performance scholar Christel Weiler, and social scientist Lars Fischer, as well as an introduction by Daniel Wetzel of the performance-label Rimini Protokoll. It also features an introduction by David Levine, and extensive photographic documentation of the rehearsal and performance, as well as an appendix reproducing sixteen pages of actor David Barlow’s private journal.