The audience is dancing. Below them the floor vibrates in the stands, in front of them six actresses romp between pink cushions. In the four corners of the stage, also on pink pedestals, the engine of this staging in the Marstall is running: the techno band Slatec. Its energetic sound revitalizes the audience like powdered soda, still water. Roman Sladek pushes his trombone, Marco Dufner (drums), Samuel Wootton (percussion) and Georg Stirnweiß (synth) whirl around, genres mix, techno meets dance floor or chanson. It feels absolutely natural to have it at the end of the premiere of “The Unheard of” gives an encore, the audience stands in the rows, dances. And not for the first time that evening.
Who would have thought? It has been clear since Friday that tightened corona measures are coming, the culture lockdown is threateningly close. The mood in the houses is, to put it mildly, depressed. And then there is an evening in the Marstall entitled “The Unheard-of. Technoid Love Letters for Ancient Heroes”. Doesn’t sound like a party. Well
An energetic evening, technoid, musical, feminine
Elsa-Sophie Jach came up with this evening. At the Marstall she has already realized her work “Heart of Glass” based on the script of the same name by Herbert Achternbusch. Now she takes on the ancient world: the love songs of Sappho, the poems about Echo, Medea, Kassandra, Medusa, Philomela and Penelope. Jach and dramaturge Stefanie Hackl put together texts by Sappho, Aeschylus, Ovid, Christa Wolf, Enis Maci and a few others. In essence, it is now about: Who writes history, determines the story. The voices of women have often been erased from it. The role of women is that of an unheard of.
But in the royal stables these basic ideas should by no means lead to great complaints. This is about empowerment, from the very first moment. Even the first appearance of the six actresses is a self-confident conquest of the room. Slatec provides the energy that Evelyne Gugolz, Franziska Hackl, Pia Händler, Katja Jung, Nicola Kirsch and Lisa Stiegler absorb and increase with ease. They are strong women who will now take control of history for themselves.
One after the other slips into the role of an ancient figure, reinterprets, criticizes the traditional stories. “The events of human history, the legends and the incidents, on closer inspection they reveal themselves to be as imprecise as they are circular,” it once said. They reinforce this impression with each new section, as well as that of a patriarchal system maintained by violence. Jach links the ancient slaughter with a contemporary event, the case of the Turkish woman Nevin Yildirim, who killed her rapist but whose condemnation sparked protests across the country. There is an exhausting amount of material that comes together, a feast for freaks of text exegesis, but above all an energetic evening, technoid, musical, female.