When the carnival spectacle is given space, some of the performers develop a joy in playing.
Photo: phillip twenty
The audience is in the dark. Just a spotlight creates a white hole of light on a wall. Then a voice (from Angela Winkler) sounds above our heads: The earth is gone, we can no longer tell whether the sounds of this world come from natural phenomena or battles. “Put dust on it” instead of sponge on it.
Suddenly a mime mingles between us guests, is accompanied by a jerky camera, opens the crowd watching her, plays, or so the voice claims, with grasshoppers, releases birds: a harbinger of the circus, the “Aeoricircus”. Many of the actors and musicians are from Berlin’s Rambazamba Theater, which has been providing inclusive theater since 1992. The ensemble members with so-called mental disabilities are active on various stages and in film. This evening (director: Jacob Höhne) they are supposed to transform the Berlin Festival House into a carnival critical of capitalism using a text by the playwright Thomas Köck. According to the text, the actors who are “other” have superpowers, which enabled them to survive the end of the world.
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Whether this evaluation of otherness is necessary can be debated. But survival in any case does not protect against internal quarrels and the search for meaning. Because suddenly a second voice screams from far above us: She doesn’t want to go to the circus anymore. An ominous authority, an oracle, is complained about: “The oracle can do me.”
At the beginning there was an express refusal to work. After this prelude on the backstage, a metal gate goes up and the audience has to take a seat. The artist Tomás Saraceno was hired to design the interior. Four large transparent balls hang from the ceiling. He is known for such installations. Oh well. We find out: We in the audience, or the people of the earth in general, are dead. The play takes place in a future in which humanity has wiped itself out in blind greed for profit and has taken the air to breathe. Four actors discuss the apocalypse, turn the defeatist sentence “This is it” into a repetitive tongue twister – then at some point the big circus breaks out.
Costume sculptures of African animals, an elephant, a zebra, a rhinoceros, move across the stage. All kinds of acrobatics are on offer. A happy mess. But the artists under the circus dome are also at a loss: a tightrope walker complains about the “social gravity” to which she feels exposed. There is always talk of “growing and disappearing”: economic expansion eliminates natural diversity. And the oracle (played by Ilse Ritter) repeats: “The circus has no order.”
Does this sound like a desire for autonomous art? The Oracle’s authority is questioned by a dissatisfied clown who wants to rehearse rebellion. The text, the piece itself – full title: “aerocirucs – a circus carnivalesque with covered wagons/against all linearities” – does not allow the desire for revolt. Instead, there are complaints about the evil actions of CEOs and managers: common wisdom. You feel ideologically fobbed off and actually don’t want players to have to unironically represent such platitudes for two hours over and over again.
A puppet theater takes place in the upper tier behind the audience: the past of the old earth is commented on in a nasty way, like in the Muppet Show. A band plays a rendition of “This is the End” – the premiere was three days before Jim Morrison’s 80th birthday. That creates atmosphere. The boxing match between two puppets, one representing science and the other representing free market economics, is again silly and toothless as a critique of what is wrong with society. The sudden sexual outbursts between some of the actors and puppets are misplaced sensationalism.
When the carnival spectacle is given space, some of the performers develop a joy in playing. As soon as the action on stage dissolves, circus freedom arises. A highlight is the disturbing version of “High on the Yellow Car.” A knife thrower and sword swallower fools the audience shortly before the end, perhaps exposing the desire for transgression somewhere, but it remains a joke.
Köck’s text, which has beautiful passages in the description of dystopian worlds, dominates the evening with its flat, truncated criticism of an environmentally polluting capitalism. One can agree that the great comedy of different individuals is preferable to the universal tragedy, as is super-discursively stated in one of the last scenes. The only regret is that the audience keeps laughing in the wrong places because some of the actors falter because the production and text cannot highlight the strengths of the Rambazamba crew. This leaves the impression that a concept has been pursued over their heads that, as is often the case with Anthropocene art, ignores people.
Next performances: December 9th and 10th.
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