Landscapes of the 21st Century: Towards a Universal Performance Language

Compagnie Faim de Siècle, Schiller by Night/Landscapes, Internationale Schiller Tage, Mannheim, Germany, June 18-24, 2003.

The National Theatre of Mannheim hosted the 12th International Schiller Days 2003, expanding the program of guest performances of German and international productions devoted to Friedrich Schiller's work by co-producing the bi-continental (New York-Paris) Compagnie Faim de Siècle's new work, Schiller by Night/Landscapes. Within the context of German theatre, which is dominated by high concept productions of the European repertoire by contemporary directors, the invitation by the city of Mannheim, where Schiller's The Robbers premiered in 1782, to have the author given a state-of-the-digital art treatment fits comfortably in the country's ongoing dialogue with the classics. So, rather than being an isolated event, it became part of the history of Schiller stagings in Germany, viewed alongside other productions at the festival, which ranged from the conventional stagings of state theatres, like the Czech Republic's Parasite fromBrno, to another video/installation/performance, Playing Schiller, by the French company from Lyon, Là Hors de.

Schiller by Night/Landscapes reveals all the promise and challenge of large-scale international productions that try to maneuver between the local and the global. Conceived by Ibrahim Quraishi, whose Medea-inspired piece, Shattered Boxes, was performed by his company at The Kitchen in New York, in 2000, the new work featured at least thirty installation, light and costume designers, performers, sculptors, musicians, and video and computer artists from the U.S., Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. It took place in seventeen different spaces in a building in the Nekrau industrial area on the edge of Mannheim, to which the audience was driven in buses that departed the festival center at 10:00 P.M. From the start, a sense of danger was cultivated as the passengers were given visa applications to fill out and, upon arriving at a dark and unpopulated area, were immediately ushered into the foyer where they were decontaminated, stamped, and otherwise processed. The more than two-and-a-half hour evening unfolded as a Piranesi-like journey, rather a contemporary link to the medieval mystery play, through landscapes/events that varied in light, sound, smell, color, climate, and emotional tone. Guards or guides lead the way in the controlled, total environments whose many wrapped figures encountered along the way underscored the general feeling of entrapment in a world that mixed real time and virtual time, live and digitized images, and the vapors of immateriality with physical states of being. While the "landscapes" (which in contemporary theatre seems to be the preferred definition of space for any series of discreet activities) opened up to many scenes of imprisonment, surveillance, interrogation, and abjection, possibilities of communication and transformation were still viable in this panoramic setting.

Not quite a site-specific work but similar to the genre produced in "found" spaces, with antecedents extending back decades into elaborate forms of Happenings and "actions" here and in Europe, Schiller by Night/Landscapes steadily led the spectators who were divided into smaller groups (not really an "audience" in the public, communal sense of the word, and more like anonymous museum-goers or pedestrians), through a series of rooms of varying size and stimulation to watch and sometimes participate in the events unfolding. These included: confronting a number of cots holding bodies being scanned; entering a grassy landscape of dancers, some caked in mud, and moving around sculpted cloth figures; wading through water on a brick pathway in a cave-like opening where an image of a woman is projected on a wall and heard on tape; being fitted with long coats and surgical masks and wandering around in a lab-like setting; the entire group of spectators gathering finally to watch simultaneous actions and interactions by all the performers in a large open...