2023-06-24 08:33:58
24 June 2023. The ground shimmers damp. The sunbathers and folding chairs await the occupier. The bar is barricaded. The water basin prepared for cooling feet that sweat in the summer only reflects the grim cloud cover. At the opening of this year’s Theaterformen, the stormy low Lambert appears as an uninvited guest. The Prinzenstraße in front of the Hanover theater is specially closed to visitors, and the British collective “The DisOrdinary Architecture” has installed a meeting point deck in the middle of the road, framed in plastic blue, laid out in plastic blue, irradiated in plastic blue. But the plastic pollution of the oceans is not to be criticized in this way, but the “Making waves” motto is to be illustrated. For which waves are also painted on tarpaulins and a bench in the form of waves comes along.
“How do you feel?”
However, this refers less to the content of the 13 productions from ten countries shown, and is meant more as a PR symbol. One wants to make waves, set something in motion, create change, says the artistic director Anna Mülter in the rain-proof foyer of the Schauspielhaus for her third festival edition. While the Taube performer Daniel Kotowski struts through the audience as “Feeler”, shouting “How do you feel?” asks and invites you to type an answer. But sign language interpreters with “DGS to go” written on their vests can also be asked to enter into the dialogue.
Because apart from the wave rhetoric, the festival really wants something: accessibility and inclusion are at the top of Mülter’s agenda. In 2023 she is concerned with enabling encounters between hearing and deaf people on an equal footing and celebrating their art as a strongly visual and, thanks to the more than 300 sign languages worldwide, per se highly performative expression of a minority culture that can inspire contemporary theater forms. Taube guest curator Rita Mazza is therefore on board.
The weather is the smallest problem © Katrin Ribbe
The champagne flutes are quickly emptied and the thunderstorm raging in front of the doors is also making its way onto the theater stage. The escalation of the weather from gently summery flattery to stormy heavy rain attacks is described, while an oddly brilliant trio of comedians in a devastating illusion landscape tries with great effort to dismantle the wind turbine stage set and with it “the future”, as they rave regarding.
Until the entire stage machinery boils over and shows what it can do, while the players’ voices, treated with reverberation, distortion and amplification, swell to apocalyptic noise. Later, the zero line of life and the pain of existential loneliness is translated into nerve-wracking sound flatulence. This world premiere by the Chilean director and author Manuela Infante, a regular guest at Mülters Theaterformen, is entitled “What you can’t see”.
Attention bloodsuckers!
The three mimes appear like pale Beckett end-players, but soon reveal themselves to be vampires who work night shifts as stagehands and now find themselves compelled to offer entertainment by the stupidly present audience. So teach them a little bit. Just explain the wind turbine metaphor and that they themselves represent our society as unhappily exhausted figures. You don’t have to say more. The audience can go. “You were wonderful. That’s art. Pay, understand, go home.” But all spectators remain smiling, smiling, laughing loyal to the unwilling entertainers.
So they continue to talk in a skillfully improvised style through various fashionable topics – Christian’s (Nils Rovira-Muñoz) outing comes up, Balthasar (Torben Kessler) mocks people who always stare at cell phones, it’s regarding efficiency madness, scientific criticism, climate change, commercialization and so on. The Ever Living Dead also celebrate choral scream therapy and recall their dietary reputation for sex and greed. Victoria (Helene Krüger) describes her initiation bite as rape, but is also busy preventing the infectious colleagues from storming the blood filling stations in the parquet.
Stormproof and grounded © Katrin Ribbe
All of this is sometimes slapstick cute, sometimes humorously absurd, sometimes profoundly silly, sometimes slurringly boring – or touchingly serious. The fear of the fragility of the health construct flares up once more and once more as a core theme. In the program flyer, Infante explains the vampire as a creature that returns from death, to remind us that sickness, decay or death is something we cannot repress, deny, bury in the hope that it will go away. So it’s regarding understanding life as a disease leading to death, as Søren Kierkegaard once described it.
Light-footed on the abyss
In order to find a way of dealing with it, the tired three of them suggest slowing down and reciting from Virginia Woolf’s essay “On Being Sick” for as long as they’re tired under a giant moon. In it, illness is described as an opportunity to finally step out of time – “irresponsible and unconcerned and able, perhaps for the first time in years, to look around us, to look inside – the sky, for example”. Which is then pushed into the spotlight on a huge backdrop and adorned with the message of the evening: “Only the downtrodden are the ones who know what nature ultimately hardly tries to hide – that in the end it triumphs.”
To put it this way, Woolf has struggled with major depression and mental breakdowns throughout her life, making her reimagining of illness unappealing. The fact that the passages and the entire evening do not make you sad or desperate, but joyfully relaxed in light-footed grunting, characterizes this joyfully playful, ultimately lightest and funniest memento mori for a long time.
“Fragile” by Alessandro Schiattarella and Ensemble © Clemens Heidrich
Alessandro Schiattarella’s production “Zer-bruch-lich” is the second Theaterformen premiere. It is happily included and shown that a physical limitation does not have to be read as a handicap or covered up as a deficiency, but can be emphasized as an advantage, as something special and used aesthetically as its own quality. Also understood as an alternative to leveled body ideals that are “toxic illusions” and “prejudices perpetuated by our capitalist society”, as the performers emphasize.
The Latvian Victoria Antonova, the Italian Alice Giuliani and the Algerian-born Laila White introduce themselves and their various bodies, understand the scars as blatantly cool tattoos, discrimination as a source of strength and their own vulnerability, as with Infante, as a reality to be accepted, yes , as a sign of being human. Everyone sings, more or less or not at all skillfully, a few songs by Gina Été that revolve around the presented subjects, which Richard Schwennicke dresses up with beats and sounds in pretty much any oversized pop garb. To this end, the performers are on the move in an interactive manner, exploring and conquering the possibilities of their own movement canon. They also allow themselves to be carried away by symbolic scenes such as breaking through (foam block) walls.
Dramaturgically, musically and choreographically, the work is not entirely convincing. The way she makes disabilities visible, however, and makes them temporarily dance, sound and speak, captivates as a humorous empowerment. It will be continued in the next season with the production “Breaking point”.
What you can’t see
von Manuela Infante
Text, concept and direction: Manuela Infante; Concept, music and sound design: Diego Noguera; Stage and Lights: Rocío Hernández; Costumes: Annabelle Gotha; Dramaturgy: Camila Valladres, Johanna Vater.
With: Torben Kessler, Helene Krüger and Nils Rovira-Muñoz.
Cooperation with the Hanover Theater
Premiered on June 23, 2023.
Duration: 1 hour 45 minutes, no break
Fragile
von Alessandro Schiattarella and Ensemble
Direction, choreography: Alessandro Schiattarella; Musical direction: Richard Schwennicke; Stage: Margarete Albinger; Costumes: Giulia Marcotullio; Light: Uwe Wegner; Dramaturgy: Martin Mutschler; Songwriting: Gina Été; Xchange: Matthias Brandt / Daniel Riedel.
Starring: Victoria Antonova, Alice Giuliani and Laila White.
Cooperation with the Hanover Theater
Premiered on June 23, 2023.
Duration: 1 hour 10 minutes, no break
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