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"Touch" performance in the Münchner Kammerspiele: evocation of the zeitgeist that avoids profundity
Photo: Sigrid Reinichs / Müpnchner Kammerspiele
The sigh "Lord, let your brain rain down!"
will finally be taken literally on Thursday evening in the most famous theater in Munich.
A huge gold-colored model of the human brain floats from the stage ceiling, while women and men in brightly colored costumes try to tell of the great needs of our time with words and dance movements.
They pull their hair synchronously, collectively throw themselves to the ground and shake their shoulders together again.
You speak headline articles about contagious viruses, melting polar ice caps and factory farming.
"94 percent of all mammals on earth are farm animals," one learns, for example.
Did you know?
"Touch" is the name of the premiere with which Barbara Mundel, the new director of the Münchner Kammerspiele, opens her first season.
She is the successor of the controversial theater director Matthias Lilienthal, who was the boss in Munich for five years and who with his work so disturbed some conservative culture lovers from the city that he voluntarily dropped it in the end;
His house was twice voted "Theater of the Year" in the annual poll of German-speaking critics.
Mundel is 61 years old and, before she headed the theater in Freiburg for many years, was once a dramaturge at the Münchner Kammerspiele.
For her opening season, she has now prescribed the motto, which may have been hatched in long management team meetings, for the theater: "Don't leave reality alone", without a dot, without an exclamation mark.
A piece in which Christian Drosten appears
Director and author Falk Richter and choreographer Anouk van Dijk have the privilege of hosting the welcome premiere in the main building of the Kammerspiele on Maximilianstrasse.
With plays such as "Electronic City", "Trust" and "Fear" Richter has managed to become a dramatist who is widely played internationally;
his texts are evocations of the zeitgeist, avoiding any profundity, of a present marked by technical revolution, impulse jams and diffuse fears.
In "Touch" too, Richter lively pursues vulgar sociology.
The text begins as a corona diary of an individual in quarantine who complains about his lack of ties, watches animal films and Netflix series.
This is followed by a short tabloid interlude in which two sisters greet a gay couple in their apartment at the end of the shutdown and argue with the guests about the virologist Christian Drosten, the hatred of government control and corona conspiracy theories.
The rest of the play works like the cabaret of the Munich laughing and shooting society in their best, long-gone times.
People talk hectically about all the topicalities of the time, as if reading to each other from the newspaper.
Often spherical music crunches and chirps in the background, sometimes songs are sung to stupid guitar noise.
Richter's text, it may be said, is banal for sniffing and giggling.
One of the dancers and actors on the stage is allowed to recite a passage.
In addition, the other players bend over in panic ecstasy, twitch in convulsions and roll their eyes while staring into a gloomy world.
At some point in the big Laberflash of this evening there is talk of apparently human, hyperactive "particles", the Munich particle people dancing on stage more like synchronized swimmers on dry land.
It also fits that the set designer Katrin Hofmann has heaved blue shimmering ice floes onto the stage.
You can even use an inclined chunk of polar ice as a slide.
A slack rubber boat serves as a fashionable cape
On perforated walls that slide from the stage sky and are prepared as gigantic soldered computer chips, one sees television pictures of all the hardships and catastrophes evoked by the text: starving refugees, burning forests, spinning hurricanes.
Because everything is being doubled and tripled here, the set designer Andy Visiting one of the actors made a rubber dinghy cape.
The artist Ai Weiwei recently presented life jackets in the shops of a hardware store chain as a sign of alleged solidarity;
In the Kammerspiele, hopefully well-paid actors from a publicly subsidized theater show a slack rubber dinghy cover as their model of solidarity-radical chic.
"Touch" not only sounds like the notorious trend researcher Matthias Horx has put together an evening at the theater, the performance also looks like it.
Each figure is somehow a typical exhibit and part of an "exhibition" that people sometimes talk about.
One wears a stone age look (symbol of archaic aggressiveness), knight armor (as a guarantee of distance) or zombie masks (as a sign of inner emptiness).
The actress Anne Müller has disguised herself as Marie Antoinette and pisses a tirade into the hall against the depravity of the modern luxury people who don't want to let their fun with "champagne and cake" spoil.
Are you referring to the wealthy people in Munich's theater audience?
No, for the final applause, the artistic director Mundel trudges on the stage with the director Richter and assures all those present how much she is looking forward to the theater, the city and all of its citizens (including the rich).
On the Kammerspiele website, Mundel's team describes the theater in a slightly puzzling text as an "organ" of the city.
"An aesthetic organ, a social organ, an organ that tries to expand freedoms."
After all, since the "Touch" premiere we have had an inkling of how to imagine this organ: It is obviously a golden human brain.
"Touch", Münchner Kammerspiele, further performances today, on October 20th, 22nd and 31st.
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