If a performance is already called “trance”, you know immediately what you are dealing with: some spiritual claims will soon find form here. The term “trance” derives from the dead language Latin and means “crossing over”. The nine-hour performance by an international collective directed by the Chinese director Tianzhuo Chen, which has now premiered at Kampnagel in Hamburg, provides good evidence of what can be observed more and more often in experimental theater: When things get colorful, loud and long in the contemporary performative arts, private myths are rarely far away. And: The esoteric is the world view of the tattoo and piercing generation, which they express either with computer animations, music or self-invented rites.
Even if the trance did not always appear in the form that the layperson imagines during the course of the evening, the introductory one and a half hours of this performance were so extremely sleepy that the first of three large halls of the old weapons factory, in which the rite took place, was soon chilled completely empty. Uniformed in sportswear, a loosely distributed group of actors lounged around on speaker towers and platforms under an inflated giant apple with a funny worm and in the deep stage fog. Some moved slowly through the room as if they had joint pains, others jerked their limbs like people half asleep on a train, while a guitarist in a crane, a zither player and a man with a bone flute created repetitive sound clusters reminiscent of the meditative works of Robert Fripp remembered.
Of course, that was a bit boring for the duration of a football match, which is why most of the visitors quickly stood in front of the open steel gate in the Kampnagel garden and tasted high-priced cans of beer from a Danish brewery. And probably discussed their knowledge of 14th-century Japanese paintings depicting the nine stages of death according to the Mahayana sutras. That’s what this opening meditation was about, as the program leaflet showed. And as the evening progressed, a great deal of knowledge from the range of esoteric bookstores and humanities seminars was used as a reference, and this was not only completely incomprehensible because most of it was presented in Indonesian without subtitles.
Ecstasy? More like a long concert under an inflated frog
Instead of being shown a Buddhist “key text” by Susan Sontag and Antonin Artaud called Delog Dawa Drolma and William Blake’s “Songs of Innocence and Experience” as promised, the next four and a half hours under an inflated frog turned into a long concert. From somewhat silly tripple dances in a circle on a round piece of lawn with balcony flowers and a pond to pounding club sounds with a whipper who led the visitors into an ecstasy that they danced, knelt and shook their hands at his command, the rest of the evening was a formative one a cult that welcomes the inferno.
Computer animations of colorful aliens with protruding ears walking on a desert planet, videos of hungry vultures and old films by ethnologists about shamanistic rituals accompanied the numerous bizarre to wild solo dances from the company to hypnotically monotonous music that has its roots in The Prodigy, industrial and doom metal. And with the involvement of the audience at a later hour, a joyful atmosphere of expectation of salvation finally emerged, when it was actually supposed to be about esoteric death.
In Roland Emmerich films, at such moments of euphoric greeting of the unknown, the underside of a flying saucer opens and a blue beam of energy kills everyone. On Kampnagel, on the other hand, a highly energetic sequence with Japanese punk and the John Lydon singing of a petite girl with an accordion was followed by a kind of polonaise in the club of the cultural center, where dancing, screaming and hammering on the gates of heaven continued in a relaxed manner. Since the evening is co-produced by the Komische Oper in Berlin (because snazzy marketing entities are selling Tianzhou Chen’s work as “the new opera”), this entertaining witch disco of modern faith alchemy will soon be able to shake bodies where the tattoo and piercing -Generation has its largest church.