In DRAMA, a group tirelessly explores the possibilities and limitations of stage space in our current post-pandemic era, where users have become the content of social media.
On a real theater stage, it still seems that what works most safely is what the audience already knows. Shakespeare? Sophocles? Again? With suits? The performers side question and examine different genres, which they fuse into a recreation of the theatrical genre “La Revista Argentina”: a mixture of cabaret and revue with French glamour, catchy Spanish-language music, the humor of Italian immigrants, lots of feathers, big musical numbers and famous comedians. “La Revista Argentina” was created in the time of the Weimar Republic, at the same time Buster Keaton presented The Enchanted House, where criminals and bad actors from a mediocre Faust meet by chance.
The characters in DRAMA vacillate between an anthropological need to carve up pop culture in order to find the tension between a high and low art and the stained endurance of the glamour dancers inside the Argentine revue of the 1920s. Despite the genre being considered populist and superficial, they act with Spartan endurance and without flinching in pain. The atmosphere gains another dimension with the music of Robert Lippok, which contrasts with the musical references of pop songs.
The performers compete with the exhausted attention span of an audience in the era of clickbait. How can one compete with the constant spectacle that politics and news, fake or real, provide?
Drama is no longer just in the theater, it’s everywhere. Joseph Campbell’s reparation with the father is the root and repetition of endless heroic stories of a patriarchal nature, but are these heroic journeys even a reflection of the male director with a father complex?
Concept, direction, choreography: Constanza Macras
dramaturgy: Carmen Mehnert
by and with: Candaş Bas, Alexandra Bódi, Emil Bordás, Campbell Caspary, Fernanda Farah, Thulani Lord Mgidi, Ann Göbel, Shiori Simikawa, Miki Shoji
Live music by and with:
Katrin Schüler-Springorum, Lucas Sofia
Music composition: Robert Lippok
Stage: Simon Lesemann
Costumes: Eleonore Carrière
Lighting: Hans-Hermann Schulze
Assistant director: Mica Heilmann
Production management: Jimena Soria
Production Office: Léo Pflimlin R.
