The Zurich theater spectacle celebrates its opening – culture

You stand on the Saffa Island and look out over Lake Zurich. The banks are glittering, the moon hangs full over the dark water. A man in a colorful robe that looks like sewn together from different colored tinsel plays the accordion, at first a little melancholy, then more and more melodies creep into his playing. Behind the empty stage the sea, next to it a canvas, on this one too you can see water and a writing: “Anatomy of violence in Colombia”. Then a man in a white dress appears on the screen, sitting in a canoe and wearing a screaming horror mask. He looks like a harbinger of an evil, dark carnival.

That Zurich theater spectacle was founded in 1980, in the same year as the Rote Fabrik, a left-wing alternative, internationally important cultural center on the lake, which also serves as the venue for the festival. Both founding were a reaction to extremely violent youth protests in Zurich at the time. In the meantime, the theater spectacle has long played in the top league of international European theater festivals. In 2019, the year before Corona, the anniversary was celebrated, 40 years, 25,000 people bought tickets for more than 30 productions, and another 130,000 saw the free supplementary program. One million francs was taken in a good two weeks at the cash register and through the catering trade, a fifth of the total budget. The following year: no gastronomy, hardly any tickets that cost anything, hardly any income, but there was also a (very reduced) festival in 2020. A single performance took place as planned, the rest had to be rescheduled or postponed until this year, when the offer is still slightly reduced.

Now the production of the Mapa Teatro from Colombia – it’s called “La Balsada” – like the fulfillment of a promise, which may be a bit bizarre in view of the subject, the violence in Colombia. On the dark lake out there is a shining boat, hung with garlands of lights. It could be one of the excursion boats here, but it’s getting closer, docks. The person who was previously seen on the screen comes ashore, followed by four figures that look like tinsel trees and soon show a desolate, very physical demeanor, while the man in the dress with a whip with the formerly the slaves were beaten by the colonial masters, strutted around.

With “La Balsada”, produced by Theaterspektakel and the Mapa Teatro troupe founded in Bogotá by the Swiss-Colombian artist Heidi Abderhalden in the 1980s, you have to imagine Lake Zurich as the sea for a long moment. About this comes what has not been seen here for at least a year and a half – non-European theater. And now this ship docks, and its crew, like the films on the screen, celebrate a fabulous mixture of festival and violence, announce festivities in the village of Guapi, an evocation of life full of joy and tears: evidence of the exploitation of the population, the civil war , Men wear women’s clothes, dark-skinned people wear white masks, you can feel an anger that you can’t escape from, even if you don’t understand every picture.

Almost all performances are decidedly political

But this partial lack of understanding is so beneficial because it breaks up the tightness in the head. The fact that Central European theater seeks inspiration in distant countries is old hat, but only now you notice what was missing in the last two years: the immediacy of this influence. While the German-speaking city theaters gradually approach the necessity of diversity, the Colombians simply slam down their historically traditional and socially determined role models angrily devastating carnival, in whose film images one can soon no longer distinguish between war or a festival.

As a comment one could cite a sentence by Matthias von Hartz, who has just extended his contract as artistic director of the Theaterspektakels until 2025: “When you get that much money for a festival, it has to reflect the world and cannot just be art. ” And the world is not just Central Europe. On the opening weekend in Zurich, performances from Colombia, Rwanda, South Korea, Hong Kong and Morocco can be seen, sustainably produced and wrested from the corona conditions and travel restrictions in a sometimes adventurous way. Some artists have had longer residencies in Europe, go on tour or research here as a result of the spectacle, no troupe travels to Zurich just for the performance. And almost all of them are decidedly political or are concerned with changes in society.

An uncomfortable question: Who will clean the museum, please?

Early afternoon, 30 degrees. On the Landiwiese, the main venue, there are people in bathing suits, between which one meanders to the lecture by Françoise Vergès. The political scientist and activist, who lives in Paris, speaks about decolonial feminism, capitalist structures of exploitation in which women in particular are stuck, and she tells a grandiose story: She leads tours in the Louvre and wants to draw attention to images that show slavery. So she led her group in front of a picture showing rich men smoking pipes – a symbol of smug masculinity and slavery. Because where does the tobacco come from and who works in the plantations? And then there is still the question: Who will clean the museum, please?

Open detailed view

“Mailles”, the piece by the Rwandan-British artist Dorothée Munyaneza, has a similarly mind-expanding effect. This puts six women, six different biographies on the stage. Their dance is African, but doesn’t look like it; They sing, one is a spoken word artist, one, Yinka Esi Graves, moves between the most virtuoso flamenco and aesthetic physicality, skipping continents in the process. Supported by very graphic poems, all of which aim to uproot the individual, this performance elegantly undermines traditional Central European discourses on racism and feminism.

Many of the artists come from countries in which one cannot make a living from art alone. Matthias von Hartz talks about members of the Nature Theater of Oklahoma, whose problem in the Corona lockdown was less the closed theaters, but the closed restaurants. Where should they make money? At least 80 percent of the performances of the spectacle planned for 2020 and then canceled could be paid for at least 80 percent. But that does not guarantee survival.

All the more astonishing how almost out of nowhere the Hong Kong artist Royce NG hits Zurich and uses an avatar and a flood of images in “Presence” to warn of the dangers of artificial intelligence – if it is not used intelligently. The South Korean Jaha Koo, on the other hand, needs nothing more than a talking, friendly flashing rice cooker with which he can talk from person to machine. Koo is tormented by the question of the loss of the theatrical past in his country, first through a conscious self-colonization, in which the king brought theater from the west to Korea and made it ideal, then through the annexation by the Japanese. An origami toad drives around, an evil spirit rages on a canvas, devouring all memories. Koo remembers his grandmother, who sang him to sleep, and in Koo the hope germinates that the “History of Korean Western Theater” could lead to something new, self-confident, self-determined.