Press File - Kunstenfestivaldesarts

ihn! Murx ihn! Murx ihn ab! [Kill the European! Kill him! Kill him! Kill him! Kill him off!] at the
Berliner Volksbühne must repeatedly run to a washroorn when signalled and then sit clown
again at their respective, single tables. A clock hanging on the wall shows that no time has
elapsed. Qualitatively speaking, nothing changes in the lives of these people who are locked up
in oversized rooms. But in dreams or memories they fall out of their routine. Toward the end of
the production of Kill the European, which has been called a requiem to the GDR, there is a
moment in which the obligatory duty of waiting and repeating is suspended. Two of the actors
begin to play klezmer music, at first very softly, then filling the whole room. The supposed
standstill in which the music itself takes over the tempo is memory-time. It is a rip in the
established course of time which frees up recollection.
Walter Benjamin distinguished between ‘empty’ and ‘filled’ time. Empty time is the present
sequence, a serial time without history. Filled time is time charged with a past and a future. In
Marthaler's theatre, it is mostly the music which allows time to be filled. It produces an
unconscious state, similar to dreaming and sleeping. When people sleep in Christoph
Marthaler's productions, it means more than merely a dramaturgical device. Sleep refuses to be
fixed in time. Sleep relieves the strain of meaning. In sleep and dreams the figures on stage can
express a different possibility of their existence which does not occur in their present now: what
else people could be, if they could. Sleeping, dreaming, daydreaming, these defensive,
persistent activities are in Marthaler's theatre emblematic states of people. Sleep relieves the
burden of intentional speaking; it has no goal; it dilates time.
Even the theatre always has to remember the theatre. The spaces are remembered spaces.
The people are remembered and dreamt people. The sentences which they utter are not
available as a matter of course. They are residual pieces of speech, which have been left
behind after great accidents. Anna Viebrock dresses these people in various, more recent and
older pasts. One has the feeling of having seen them before on the street, though perhaps not
today. In this belated perspective nothing can be taken for granted any longer. All of Marthaler's
works have this perspective: nothing is, rather it just passed or will become. Something ended
and the ‘becoming‘ can be no new assertion. One always sees and hears traces. This temporal
shift is the point of departure of narrative.
Marthaler's theatre is a theatre of victims, never one of perpetrators. His characters are the kind
who withdraw. They do not even want to be on stage. If they get caught up in an activity, they
find themselves in a dilemma and search for a way out. It is therefore natural that this theatre is
slow. In an epoch in which speed is a powerful social value and in which one can be
everywhere at once and see everything at once, slowness as an aesthetic structure is a
provocation. For the strong are celebrated as those who have done away with time as duration
and passage. Here is a theatre which above all else through its rhythm says: I do not belong.
And this slowness is more than a style and more than a theme. Here is a director who takes his
time, who can wait for the actors and who can therefore observe what they do. The same
freedom and energy of observation emerge in the dilated spaces of time on stage as an overprecise
and over-concrete observation of life.
Christoph Marthaler has made time experienceable once more as an object in his theatre.
Slowness and repetition produce a rhythm which tells something about social life. Slow life is
long. People wait their entire life for something that never comes to them. In an obsessive-
compulsive arrangement they repeat similar activities. Then a brief, dramatic disturbance occurs
because a flowerpot falls over or a glass breaks, after which they return to their former, humble
attitudes. For his piece Vexations Eric Satie called for a piano composition to be repeated four
hundred and eighty times in a row. Marthaler used Vexations in his Hamburg production of
'Faust' as a music of endlessness, because people are endlessly trying to be happy.
That is an abbreviation of the life of those whom life left behind. “And life continues, as if one
had never been there…’, says Karoline in Marthaler’s production of Ödön von Horvath’s Kasmir
and Karoline. The world of images and lived experience drift a part. In the end, the optimistic
neon writing and blithe cheerfulness are confused with life. And everyone believes that he alone
is once again being left behind by life. Horvath 's fair-ground idea in Kasimir and Karoline
means the fiction of life. The rides and roller coasters are concentrations of speeds against
which is juxtaposed the slow language of those who cannot afford admissions-tickets for them.
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