Berlin theater meeting – better die

“When two knock off, that’s drama,” the theater maker Einar Schleef knew how to make it clear. But as is well known, the drama takes place less often on theater stages: it has long since made room for narrative and documentary, installative and performative forms. This also applies to »(EOL). End of Life “, this” virtual ruined landscape “, as it is said in the subtitle, which has been invited to the Berlin Theater Meeting and can now be visited in the Martin Gropius building.

Nobody knocks out here, at most the viewer with the technology. The events have been moved to virtual space. The question may come a little piefy, but it urges itself: in this case, may not only be lost the drama, but you may not have to deal with theater at all?

The basic appointment that one interacts with the other while a third watches a third is canceled. The events take place in animations. If someone plays in a person here, it is equipped with headphones and VR glasses, the viewer-or should you say: participants? – himself.

It is probably only in the most open meaning. Somewhere between animation design, virtual course and game design, which is sometimes also loudly demanded that it may finally be recognized as an art form, the event would certainly be better described. Aesthetic criteria still have to be found for this type of spectacle.

»(EOL). End of Life «, which has therefore developed the director’s duo in co-production with the BRET Vienna, leads to another world for about 90 minutes. On behalf of a fictitious tech company, the isolated spectator visits virtual worlds to decide whether they should be transferred to a new meta verse or have to fall.

Questions about the digital legacies of deceased are so effective. But soon the virtual journey is independent and from the rather technical process, which decides on the deletion of the data, becomes an immediate confrontation with deceased, which mainly takes emotionally.

Anyone who, probably still in the post-virtual tumor, is freed from the glasses at the end and have already participated in similar VR experiments beforehand that this spectacle from Vienna is more technically mature and, if the word is allowed, is “error-free”, but is also more dramaturgical, because it does not only focus on effects, but tries to tell a story.

Nevertheless, leaves »(EOL). End of Life «a double discomfort for the critic. On the one hand, there is the physical discomfort that comes over part of the viewership of VR events. Slightly headed, a little cold sweat on the forehead and a flap feeling in the stomach area – as in the morning after a night it is gin tonic too much. With the difference that you didn’t get into the gustational pleasure together with intoxication.

The other aspect concerns immersive worlds of experience, as they also produce VR productions, in general. Without any reluctance, the great emotions are called on how hardly anyone would dare in the “classic” theater. The spectators, surprised by the technological sophistication, should lightly forgive the excess of pathos. But isn’t his analytical assets to the beauty of the theater? Do artists not go far behind the Brecht Revolution here? This is not a theater in the scientific era, rather the art form for a re -accepted world.

Ideas as part of the theater meeting: 10 to 12 and 14. To 18.5.
www.berlinerfestspiele.de