Prize for Darmstadt State Theater posters

DARMSTADT – The matter is a mistake, but one that Kai Rosenstein is very happy about. In the past season the city was full of posters from the State Theater – surely it shifted its advertising budget? Not true, says Rosenstein, who is responsible for graphics in the theater’s dual marketing leadership. There weren’t any more posters than usual, they just got more attention. The Heidelberg designer Götz Gramlich took up the season’s motto “Farewell to the Heroes” in black, white and red and applied it to each of the pieces. 27 motifs were created in this way, some also for productions that no longer made it to the stage due to the Corona closure. There was now a special award for this work: the Joseph Binder Award in gold for the best poster campaign, selected by an international jury, which had to judge over a thousand entries from 46 countries.

“Find a symbol for every piece, put a title on it, done! Sounds easy, and it is, ”jokes Gramlich, because the understatement draws attention to the actual challenge. Because what is the symbol for a staging? There will be different views on this within a production team. So the graphic artist first had to read through many pieces and had quite a few sessions in Darmstadt to find out in which direction the artistic work was going. And his ideas did not always meet with approval, sometimes it took a second or third attempt to find the motif that “fits under all hats,” explains the designer. Some motives were debated for a particularly long time. For “King Oedipus”, for example, Gramlich combined the bloody hand with virtual reality glasses on which the letters “MILF” refer to sex with the mother as obscene abbreviations.

For Gramlich, who studied design in Darmstadt, the commissions from the cultural sector are particularly attractive; Among other things, he designed campaigns for the Mannheim Schiller Days and the Mozart Summer. And if there are big houses, the fee is right. The fact that Darmstadt says goodbye to the static appearance and gives each season a new graphic face is just as courageous as it is appealing, “it’s like a fresh graphic wind sweeping through the streets”. Its wind blows in clear colors and a recurring image structure: motifs for the play in black and white, in drama more freely associated, in music theater more oriented towards the narrative of the play. Above that, red connecting lines that play with the images, finally small signals of impermanence, a crumpled paper here, a cracked glass there. The fragility is wanted when it comes to the hero’s farewell.

The conversations about the posters, Rosenstein recalls, were also good for the theater. A production team has a particularly intensive view of the artistic work, the marketing has to communicate externally – the “negotiation process about the perspective on a piece” could have an illuminating effect for everyone involved. And he contributed to the fact that the season’s motto “Farewell to the heroes” was not only perceived more publicly, but was also discussed more frequently in internal discussions. And there was also public discussion: “Posters are an extremely important image carrier for us,” says Rosenstein, “they convey to the outside world what we produce.”

For the external appearance of the house, Rosenstein uses a double strategy: The basic typography of the Sweetwater / Holst office is retained and connects the seasons. For the design of posters, flyers and programs, the theater is looking for “young but outstanding design offices” whose suggestions should already be tailored to the upcoming season’s motto. Every year a new visual language, “the change increases attention,” says the marketing man. For the current season, Sandra Doeller from Frankfurt has symbolized the request “Come into the open” with large, format-breaking, interlocking, monochrome or white-filled letters, whose background is enlivened by small, irritating, sometimes blurred photo motifs. For Rosenstein it is a design in which the individual spaces of experience open up, the personal experience. While Gramlich received an award for the posters, according to marketing, Döller deserved a prize for the overall concept.