Next door, in the large hall, the chamber orchestra Ukraina Munich plays a “peace concert”, the “Friends of the Munich Volkstheater” collect donations for the needy people in the Ukraine. Most of the musicians who came together in 2016 on the initiative of composer Taras Yachshenko and conductor Oksana Lyniv come from Ukraine. Because of Putin’s war of aggression, new colleagues have joined the group in recent days, fleeing the war and devastation in their homeland . There is a lot of Ukrainian music, Dmytro Udovychenko plays the “Requiem for Ukraine”, a violin solo that the Georgian violinist Lisa Batiashvili commissioned by Igor Loboda after Putin occupied Crimea in 2014.
One would have liked to have heard all of this, should have heard it, but one is next door, on Stage 2 of the Volkstheater, at the world premiere of “Hyper”. Incidentally, there is also music in it, panting organ sounds, composed and embedded in a sound design by Benedikt Brachtel, always present and mostly without major dramaturgical value, but strangely iridescent in effect. How the whole evening is most beautiful when he surrenders to the power of his video images and the concrete scenic events hardly play a role anymore. Then you find yourself in a visual poem.
“Hyper” is Florian Schaumberger’s first directorial work
Florian Schaumberger is a video artist, “Hyper” is his first directorial work, that explains a lot. First of all, the actor Vincent Sauer sets himself up, blows away the stage fog with a leaf blower, builds a bed out of three mattresses, puts a refrigerator and a small table next to it. Sauer is busy, stays like that all evening, a bright, euphorically interested young man, who also taxes a text himself, a small phenomenology of the orange, which wafts over in a style from distant times and gives the impression that Sauer once had one for followed a completely compelling idea for him, but has since forgotten it.
The first words heard in the performance come from Hölderlin, “Hyperion”, and everything that follows is a variation of it, especially a pictorial variation: “To be one with everything that lives, to return in blissful self-forgetfulness to All of nature is the summit of thoughts and joys.” O blissful nature! If you have just climbed a summit with snowshoes in the dark and experienced the sunrise up there, you understand it immediately.
There are also Schaumberger’s often fabulous video images, slightly manipulated reality: an apartment block facade, a similarly structured corn field, rails, canned vegetables on the shelves, we love food. Man has lost nature, Vincent Sauer recaptures it in the film, sabotages the artificiality of the goods to be consumed in the supermarket, Heinz Brenner dies there next to him and then wanders naked through the forest, tells on stage about an accident he barely survived as a film extra in nature. The last picture is an earthworm, the evening meanders in a similarly idiosyncratic way.