An elderly man holds a male figure in front of his body. Wooden pegs bigger than the little man perform a dance on the table. There are no drawings or even texts. It’s also about dreams and other webs, which a voice reports from the off at the same time. And things immediately get pretty haywire in this guest performance from Norway, which took place halfway through the figure theater festival “wunder.” was visible in high X. The Theater Corpus, which is dedicated to the satirical magazine Simplicissimus, is one of around 30 ensembles from all over the world that will not only provide enchantment in various venues between Pasing and Haidhausen until November 8th.
The festival motto “Make history!” comes along as an imperative. includes all performances for adults and children. The times when puppet theater meant only cheerful amusement are long gone. Or, like some other past that has only been looked at in part, never existed in this absoluteness. “wonder.” in any case, plain language speaks about the catastrophes of yesterday and today, albeit in an intoxicating variety of artistic languages. Unfortunately, this does not apply to every production.
The Norwegian “Simplicissimus”, for example, overexplains some and under-explains much. He lets revue on reading, cabaret on slapstick, lets tap-dance, chant, sing and figures of all types appear in rapid succession, without these ever gaining a real life of their own. And what it’s actually about is hardly mentioned: the struggle for power, freedom and conscience within the editorial staff of the Munich satirical magazine, here as an example between the Norwegian cartoonist and illustrator Olaf Gulbransson (1873 – 1958), who because of his political adaptability on Goebbels’ “God-gifted” list, and that Simplicissimus-Editor Thomas Theodor Heine, who wanted to maintain the critical course of his magazine even after Hitler came to power. If you pay close attention, you can catch a good deal of the quarrels of these two, but the evening always boggles down in the trivial and private, temporarily making itself heard with cleverly set to music satirical poems, but failing to draw a link to what is political satire to this day.
“Coffee with sugar?” traces the colonial entanglements of Germany.
(Photo: Pablo Hassmann)
What figure and object theater can do, especially with regard to power and history, has been seen in various and often very impressive ways to date. Right at the festival opening, Laia RiCa absolved in “Kaffee mit Zucker?” these raw materials twice as much as we take them for granted today. In their fragrant and sounding material performance, they become the material for the most unbelievable images and moods, while Laia RiCa incidentally reveals Germany’s colonial entanglements, which still have an impact on the producing countries of Central and Latin America.
From the touching solo from Ljubljana, which brings the child’s perspective of flight to life with animated chalk drawings, to the Belgian documentary theater evening about life in the neighborhood of Fukushima, populated with sad puppet ghosts: “wonderful.” is a real surprise bag. Those who reach into it almost inevitably make discoveries! Whether in the children’s theatre, where this year for the first time (and then four!) great productions from Munich’s independent scene are represented (the extremely delightful “Bremer Stadtmusikanten” by the duo Giesbert & Lutz, who tackle their skills themselves and are still on Sunday at 3 p.m. in Munich City Museum) as in the adult program.
“Dance is great rhythmic movement to music” – in this production there is definitely no dancing, at least that’s what they say.
(Photo: Christian Schuller)
There, in Dries Verhoeven’s “Homo Desperatus”, ant colonies take control of 44 apocalyptic locations for the entire weekend, which the visual artist and theater maker from the Netherlands has recreated true to scale for the cool crawling creatures. The camera then brings the whole thing back to human proportions. Verhoeven’s compatriots from the Hotel Modern collective have taken a similar path, and their 17-year-old notorious production “Kamp” is coming to Munich for the first time. In it, everyday life in the Nazi death camp in Auschwitz is reconstructed without a word using 3,000 small wire puppets and filmed live (November 3 and 4, 8 p.m., Kammerspiele).
If all this is too gloomy for you, let yourself be taken by surprise at the end of the festival in the Schauburg by the well-paid theater prankster Jetse Batelaan, who promises in “Dance is great rhythmic movement to music” that there will definitely be no dancing. But maybe the rousing beat and all the props and objects on stage have a say as well?
wonderful., info under www.wunderpunktfestival.de