»The 13th Year«: Collective Signa: The simulation is sold out

Don’t play – we should feel, the team from Lethe Simulationswelten tells us, 40 people, at the end of the short lecture, on the path that leads through a long, cool tunnel to the nameless fog village, where we will spend the next few hours. We are twelve years old – that is the fiction of the simulation program we are in. In reality, the company Lethe, ancient Greek for “forgetting,” is itself a simulation, created by the Signa collective, famous for its performative installations. Anyone who has ever attended a Signa production will have an idea of ​​what will happen: the audience will be taken into another world, relationships will be dissolved – anyone who came with a partner will be separated from him or her and placed in a new environment. For an evening, if not for a whole night or several days. Everything already existed at Signa. And at “We Dogs” in Vienna in 2016, you could even get yourself whipped.

There is something to experience at Signa. And so we quickly start talking in front of the gate of the former Thyssenkrupp site in Hamburg, where we wait before the performance. There, in an abandoned factory hall, Signa is currently showing “The 13th Year”. “How many is yours today?” one asks me, who even flew all the way to Petersburg in 2019 to see a piece by the group. No wonder that the performances of “The 13th Year” were sold out in just a few minutes. If you didn’t have any luck in pre-sales, you can only wait at the factory gate on game nights and hope that someone doesn’t come. The Deutsches Schauspielhaus, which produced “The 13th Year” with Signa, warns against counterfeit tickets.

Back to the fog village. We twelve-year-olds got stuck in the mountains on the way to a holiday destination; the fog made orientation impossible. So we end up in that village, wandering around in the semi-darkness between night-gray huts from which masked faces stare out. What now? The answer comes from poorly dressed figures who take us by the hand and quickly drag us into the houses. Outside is hostile. Over tea, we gradually learn more about the strange place, whose residents got there three years ago in a very similar way to us. Only old Erwin was already there…

I end up in a family of four with three others from the audience. Where we “not children” are quickly integrated into the community. Mother Maryna and her three children, son Darek and daughter Daria (the sick second daughter is a doll) don’t have much, but they share it with us. We are given tea and warm clothes – with the clothes we bring we shed a part of our adult identity that has become habitual. We learn about missing and remaining villagers, the tradesman and the peddler, when suddenly there is a bang on the door and Samuel comes in, whose relationship with Maryna turns out to be explosive but also surprisingly loving.

What does all this mean? This much is clear: it is a society in fear. Fear of the outside, but also of what is inside people. When little Darek blurts out that he is in love with Marius, his mother Maryna squashes him that it has some kind of meaning. That is sin! You want to give him a comforting hug. And does it. This way you become part of the dynamic of this production. As it miraculously happens again and again with Signa.

Things take their course. Two of us have to help Samuel, who is having a violent breakdown in front of all of us because he can’t stand Maryna’s prayers. The others are allowed to visit Daria’s best friend, who sings a scary, beautiful Japanese love song. From there we go on to another hut – and on and on and back to “our” new family. Here we are used to peeling potatoes and washing dishes until the next adventure. For example, spin the bottle with the village youth – including asking them to touch one of the young women’s breasts (“under the T-shirt!”) or show their penis. Which then no one does. At least not in my situation.

If you can’t stand so much forced intimacy, you can stop the simulation using the exit button, we were told before we went into the fog village. However, no one does this evening. Maybe because there is enough security that you can get out at any time. However, the simulation is interrupted regularly for announcements at the time of day. And once a simulation assistant from Lethe stopped by for a feedback session.

At the end of the simulation, after around five and a half hours, everything should culminate in a ritual against evil spirits. We sing together and parade around the houses. Darek begs me to sing louder. Is he fighting to make the simulation work? Or the simulation of the simulation?

At least now I’m no longer in the game. Because the twelve-year-old in me is just too far gone? Or because the whole project, with its false bottom, puts too much distance between the moderated simulation? It’s certainly not a coincidence that during the course of the evening we were even able to see the command center, where behind a window high above the action we could see the person whose voice we had heard again and again. The seams of the sky, the plastic mountain landscape – everything is as obviously fake as the dolls that lie lifeless in the corners and yet are part of the village narrative.

Is this perhaps exactly how “The 13th Year” succeeded? As a reflection of growing up, the disenchantment of the world – if not the Signa principle itself? My slight disappointment about the evening would then be a perfidious punchline. Others had a completely different experience that evening. “Crazy,” says a man after the performance. “Crazy.” Experienced SIGNA-goers compare “The 13th Year” with “The Peace.” “Too much attention to detail,” says one – you don’t know.

Next performances: December 4th, 8th, 9th and 12th to 15th.