Gisèle Vienne – Berliner Sophiensaele: Zeigt her eure Wunden

Little by little, 15 people gather on the Sophiensaele stage, which is covered with brown earth. For a short time – the performance lasts a good 90 minutes – they become a fragile community of celebration and fate, a “crowd”. If you don’t shy away from pathos, you could say: People gather here for a modern ritual. Rituals can mean excess and liberation and beneficial communality, but of course they can also mean coercion. And rituals, as Vienne does not ignore in her work, can fail.

A crowd of hipsters appear on stage with the supposedly individualistic clothing style of urban Europeans, which looks the same everywhere. Here the dancing takes place in impressive slow motion, which breaks up the condensed stage naturalism in a simple but effective way. Classics of rave culture will be played, such as Underground Resistance, KTL and Jeff Mills. The party people take over the room.

A story is told wordlessly to the driving music and the twitching movements. After a while, types, traits of the characters and hidden backstories of the dancers can be identified. The network of relationships becomes legible in its depth, but can never be fully understood.

Isn’t rave culture a particularly superficial phenomenon in our historyless present? It’s not that simple. And Vienne’s work actually shows the utopian quality that lies in the short-term alliances of dancers who seek intoxication and ecstasy.

But this evening at the theater also makes it abundantly clear that every community is at risk. Community also creates outcasts. Lightheartedness can give way to violence. The pleasure of partying also manifests itself in a sexual form, which can also turn destructive. Sometimes the clever stage arrangements freeze into tableaux vivants and the action continues as a shadow play. The uncanny, in the Freudian sense, takes the stage.

All of a sudden, the image of superficiality that once emerged does not want to be restored. Because here 15 people show themselves to be fragile, longing people, already strongly formed by their own stories and the circumstances to which they are exposed. Every character is a bearer of history. In the end, one impression remains from this emotional evening: that of vulnerability.

Heiner Müller, who saw the function of art in making reality impossible, lamented the disappearance of tragedy from the theater stage. Even today, all too often we see comedies that confidently laugh at real problems, absurd theater and post-dramatic stage puzzles. Müller identified a continuation of tragedy in Pina Bausch’s non-verbal dance theater, a theater of freedom. A completely different actor in dance theater, if this term does not form too narrow a framework, is now presenting a renewed theater of freedom. If you look for the tragic in the performing arts today, you will certainly find it in Gisèle Vienne.

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