The first monologue in Malte Schlösser’s new piece “Those who don’t think against themselves don’t think at all. Experience of absence” moves through difficult terrain. The performer Valentin Richter practices thinking against oneself, colleagues Hauke Heumann and Emma Rönnebeck watch from the sidelines. Maybe this was preceded by a relationship crisis, but now there are accusations and guilt in the room: You don’t see me, I don’t feel you, do you feel yourself at all?
Silence, ignoring, breaking off contact, Valentin lists the evil techniques for making someone small. He searches within himself for the boundary where “you” and “I” could meet and take place together and describes how it is missed again and again. Until he feels absent within himself.
Malte Schlösser, who developed the concept of the evening and implemented it as co-director together with Marie Jordan, is not only a theater maker, but also a trauma therapist. The individual in therapy is lonely and is treated as an individual case. But Schlösser looked for the social context, the patterns of fears, the survival strategies that, for example, competitive thinking creates in neoliberalism. So he came to the theater again and again. His pieces are anchored in the discourse, many have been published since 2011 TD Berlin out, a theater of the independent scene.
The first monologue is still deeply anchored in the psychological jungle of self-perception and external perception, of projections and of being enclosed in images that you have no control over. But in the texts that follow, self-reflection increasingly focuses on what is actually theater and the staging of identity. What do I do if I haven’t prepared a text, asks Emma Rönnebeck and tries to see if the audience can lend her some reality. Soon you’ll be watching her with quiet amusement as she sets out on the trail of meaning production and gets caught up in loops of discourse. One thought is that this may have caused the “crisis of post-dramatics”.
The individual in therapy is treated as an individual case. But Schlösser looked for the social context
The theater of René Pollesch sends greetings in the texts, which repeatedly seek to combine the artist’s introspection with an analysis of how capitalism has reflected itself in the body and in the poses of positioning. Some of it just throws a keyword into the room with a lot of assertion and little chance of getting to the bottom of it. But other things find illuminating moments through word games. There’s a bit of slapstick thrown in Chekhov’s “The Seagull” where the theater in the theater was already being negotiated. A ghost appears, a ancestor, so to speak, of the experience of absence, of the uncanny and inauthentic. At some point the game picks up speed and three-way scenes are designed and just as quickly torpedoed. So that the roles don’t add the fat of identification.
Finally, a film takes over: five similarly dressed actors take on a character from the other in the middle of the movement that runs through Berlin. Until this figure arrives in the theater and sits down in the empty rows of spectators. This image effectively disintegrates into flying fragments. Another wiping away of the classic patterns in the theater.
But the piece does not stop at this negative gesture; what follows is a play with light, dissolving colors, music, fog and backdrops that move without any visible people. On the one hand, you could read this as a homage to the theater as an illusion machine that you don’t want to give up and banish just yet. On the other hand, it is perhaps also a glimpse of theater after the time of humans, when machines play for the AI. And that’s the amazing thing: Even if you sit a bit perplexed in front of the disintegrating parts of a drama on the evening at the theater, when you think about it a day later, the meaning still creeps in.