I IS ANOTHER

Year & Context

2008

World Premiere  ·  Co-production FFT Düsseldorf

About the Production

It thinks me.

In 1871, Arthur Rimbaud — nineteen years old and already done with poetry — wrote a letter to his teacher. One line from it was quickly understood as a hallmark of modernity: the difficulty, the very impossibility, of keeping the unity of the self as a foundation for narration. Theater der Klänge takes that line at face value.

“It is wrong to say: I think. One should say: I am thought. I is another. Too bad for the wood that finds itself a violin, and contempt for those who are ignorant of what they argue about.”

Rimbaud  ·  Letter to Georges Izambard, 1871

Starting from this quote, four dancers — as personality prototypes — return to this theme again and again, circling it in ever-new attempts. This “show-play” is not merely about a performer’s skill in changing body, posture, and voice. Rolling mirror installations, photographic face-masks, digital morphings: old becomes young, man becomes woman. A new identity at the click of a mouse. Does it take elaborate costumes and makeup — or do a few iconic costume pieces, a face, a voice, a malleable body suffice?

Is social status, wealth, poverty, power, helplessness “genetically” determined — or is it all a matter of modelling the self? What defines an individual, and by what means? At a time when soft-skills seminars painstakingly coach body language and self-presentation, the question of how one appears, affects, and radiates is urgent and inescapable. Professional self? Social self? Nothing in our time matters quite as much as the beautiful surface. And nothing is quite as hard as the answer beneath it.

The formal framework: a five-person piece in fluidly shifting combinations — solos to quartets, comic scenes, specially composed live music. The three musicians move between tango and spherical abstraction on accordion, harmonium, cello, djoze, and violin — a soundscape without stylistic laws.

“I is Another” is, on both the theatrical and the media level, a mirror of the self-staging and social role-playing that surrounds us everywhere. An evening without answers. With many questions.

Funded by: Kulturamt der Landeshauptstadt Düsseldorf  ·  Kunststiftung NRW  ·  In co-production with FFT Düsseldorf