How long can humanity, its cities and economies continue expanding, and how long do we want them to? This is the essential question behind Schorsch Kamerun’s new music-theatre installation The Discreet Charm of Cutting Back . Working with the musician PC Nackt, the actress Annemaaike Bakker, artists from Berlin’s Komische Oper and members of Neukölln’s Richardchor, along with local residents, he aims to process the trauma of the growth imperative.

Fifty years after the publication of The Limits to Growth —a legendary, far-sighted report commissioned by the Club of Rome—Schorsch Kamerun goes in search of answers by interviewing Berliners about the dichotomy of growth versus cutting back, about ideas of sustainability and the common good: How can the ‘urge to expand’ be dealt with in a way that is sustainable for everyone? What strategies might have the most appeal, in spite of material cutting back? In distilling local voices, juxtaposing diverse images and scrutinising old ideals, The Discreet Charm of Cutting Back creates a music-theatre happening somewhere between concrete trauma and visionary dream. Through the overwhelming agglomeration of things and events, staged spectacles and their cessations, the audience becomes part of a community with a common understanding that change is both possible and necessary.

Musician and theatre maker Schorsch Kamerun teams up with talented collaborators to interrogate the present in which we live. Together, they probe our collective perceptions, organise direct public interventions and playfully promote participation instead of privatisation. Musically, their pieces explore the intersections between ‘serious’ and ‘popular’ music as well as written and ‘accidental’ music, crossing genres from free jazz to punk, serialism to modern classical to hypnotic electronic.