What makes a successful festival finale? All plays about violence, abuse and sick masculinity? The international summer festival at Kampnagel, which had started so euphorically and humorously with productions by (La)Horde, Miet Warlop and Walid Raad, entered the dark zone in the second part. After the guest performance of the nude performance “Ophelia’s got Talent” by Florentina Holzinger, which was named the best production of the year in the “Theater heute” critics’ survey, in which an actor reports in a gynecological scene that she was raped by a tattoo artist, violence against women in the festival’s next major production to an opulent art reflection on misogyny.
The focus of Carolina Bianchi’s almost three-hour educational work on rape, femicide and the artistic glorification of male violence was the famous and tragic performance “Brides on Tour” by Pippa Bacca and Silvia Moro in 2008. The two Italian performers wanted to wear white wedding dresses as a peace mission hitchhike from Milan to the Balkans to the Palestinian Territories to prove that people can be trusted. After they split up after a fight in Turkey because Moro didn’t want to get into a car whose driver she found scary, Pippa Bacca was raped and strangled near Istanbul.
“The Bride and the Goodnight Cinderella” takes this terrible story about the failed proof of the good as a fundamental shock in order to develop the tragic relationship of trust and violence with diverse performative scenes. Bianchi himself begins with a kind of lecture on the subject. From Botticelli’s “Nastagio” cycle, in which a knight hunts and kills a naked woman and feeds it to his dogs, the picture lecture comes to Pippa Bacca’s story through examples of sometimes bloody performances by Ana Mendieta or Tania Bruguera. Discussing her upset at the brutality against women, Bianca drinks gin and tonic with knockout drops and falls into a coma.
She lies on the stage, unconscious and without will, while her company stages oppressive moments about femicides in Brazil and Mexico. With many references to the content of the hundreds of murders of women in the Mexican border town of Ciudad Juarez that have never been solved, to the Brazilian goalkeeper Bruno Fernandes de Souza, who made the Nastagio story a reality on his ranch with his former lover and had to go to prison for it, and again and again with references to Pippa Bacca. The play ends with the next gynecological scene. The director, who still appears to be unconscious, is positioned naked on a cooler in such a way that the audience looks frontally between her legs during a vaginal endoscopy. A no-holds-barred piece of reconnaissance that shows women’s right to safety in the KO stage.
French director Gisèle Vienne’s new production, Extra Life, continues the dark transformation of trauma in a slow-motion choreography about two siblings who were raped by Uncle Jacky when they were 12. Beginning with a typical stoner scene in the car, in which Felix and Klara laugh silly about people who are said to have been kidnapped by UFOs, the drone very slowly develops into sluggish and twitching dance rituals.
The festival was better attended than Bayreuth
Circling around the short sentence “Stop it!” Klara initially splits into two people, and this trio then moves on a severely slowed-down time track between psyche and reality. Enveloped in an impressive light show made of fog, lasers and spotlights and accompanied by a brutally distorted form of minimal music, Gisèle Vienne choreographs a ghostly sneaking that translates the long-term effects of sexual abuse into dance – a modern danse macabre.
Irish group Dead Center’s production of “Good Sex” on the sexual gray areas surrounding the term “consensual”, seen from the perspective of intimacy coaches on the film set, also continued the preoccupation with physical assault. However, more as a friendly hands-on comedy without high standards. Under the guidance of a love counselor, two German film and theater professionals (at the premiere, Pheline Roggan and Mark Waschke) were led out of the translation booths to talk about eroticism and touch it properly, so that sex seemed “realistic, not real”. Unfortunately, the result looked like a me-too soap in a Big Brother atmosphere.
From the various boot camps for clean sex relationships, the last gloom finally led to monasticism. The world premiere of Aszure Barton’s “AA/AB: BEND” followed the black mood of the second half of the festival in terms of color. A dark emptiness, framed only by three white rings of light, in which black-uniformed hooded creatures move. In this nocturnal minimalism, the Canadian choreographer developed the romantic fantasy of a homogeneous work of art. With floating lightness and no search for a narrative message, the intelligence of the abstract movement alone counted in this dance-perfect work.
In the constant alternation of duets and formations and to the rhythmically extremely complicated music of the jazz trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire, who immersed his sound signals in cathedral reverberation, Barton designs her play of coordinated patterns. This creates movements that are sometimes reminiscent of jellyfish or seaweed, sometimes of break-dancer battles, of ironic versions of military marches or the rolling of a crankshaft. And intimate romances of classical ballet are released from the synchronicity of the crowd, which are captured again by lyrical war dances or comic sequences of movements that can be derived from colorful musicals.
This overwhelming dance of a choreography that looks as if it wants to heal the menacing fragmentation of our time with a strong gesture of unifying power, ended with a standing ovation a festival that was able to gather an impressive number of special productions. The International Summer Festival, which has been curated by András Siebold for many years, had perhaps its strongest selection this time in concentrating on meaningful thematic projects and ironic commentaries on contemporary issues. Embedded in an inviting festival atmosphere with a relaxed mood and many concerts, this great summer culture was even better attended than Bayreuth.