Trust

Hybrid forms from a blending of drama theatre and dance are still relatively rare, at least in our repertory theatres. TRUST from 2009 is based on the

Trust

By Falk Richter and Anouk van Dijk

Schaubühne / Festival d’Avignon 2009

Sendezeit:

https://www.schaubuehne.de/de/seiten/online-spielplan.html
Täglich um 18 Uhr, danach hier für 24 Stunden zum Nachschauen

(Daily from 6 PM, and then the performances will be available for 24 hours)

unique collaboration of the Dutch choreographer and dancer Anouk van Dijk and the auteur-director Falk Richter. They created a piece for five actors and three dancers that has a drama story, largely Kay’s story in the beginning, at its center and combines it with a choreography for associations between both systems. The design by Katrin Hoffmann is inspired by the interiors of clubs, with steel metal rigs, seating areas, lighting, video screens and the like. This is in line with the music by Malte Beckenbach, forcefully pressing metallic sounds.

Autobiographical

Kay’s story, however, consists of almost cinematographic memories like a cab ride across Paris because the future is uncertain and the end is always near. Crisis could be the overall title of the whole piece as well. Like in autobiographical performance art we are invited to take Kay as the impersonation of the real actor and Schaubühne member Kay Bartholomäus Schulze, who sits at centre stage. But his story is presented by another actor, Stefan Stern, in an arrangement that may stand also for the disjunctive and associative relation between the drama piece and dance altogether. In a broader narrative frame Falk Richter wants us to see and reflect the issue of interconnected systems, i.e. those of the financial systems and their collapse with those of personal relations in crisis.

As van Dijk’s choreography is concerned, its main figure seems to be how invisible forces pull the body in different directions. Van Dijk herself is one of the dancers that parallel Kay’s world. An ordeal of the contemporary condition in these interconnected systems, the whole piece is a physical, musical and also verbal inventory rather than a story as such. But as it is with a lot of similar hybrid enterprises, such is less about an intriguing story and much more about the intensity of what speaks to your senses. In that TRUST we can see a sort of celebration of crisis with theatrical means.

Politics

Yet, Falk Richter’s performances have often been seen as political, not only by his fans and followers, but also by the political right that claims one-sidedness against him when his fancy performances are spiked with statements. In 2015 Richter staged the follow-up piece FEAR at Schaubühne and addressed two protagonists of the national-conservative party AfD on stage, namely Beatrix von Storch and Hedwig von Beverfoerde. Both sued Richter and Schaubühne for personal attacks, character assassination and other issues related to their political functions and business companies. Through several courts of law, the freedom of art prevailed and Richter was largely acquitted of all charges. The whole story run over years and caught much attention as a case where AfD politicians attempted to corner public theatre in the context of politics and limitations for freedom of speech.

Richter and van Dijk’s TRUST still looks fresh, as if it were not from the archives but a recent recording from perhaps last season or so. Its subject of crisis even might be more than appropriate in this selection from Schaubühne’s best. (Published 23.03.2020)