THE BAROQUE THEATRE OF MASKS

Year & Context

1989

Premiere 6 April 1989

About the Production

“An abracadabra of the sublime, ironically circumscribed, the comical and grotesque – it would not be undeserved if this serious experimental theatre gained a wider audience.”

— Opernwelt

In 1988, following the founding production of the Mechanical Bauhaus Stage – our first encounter with the theatre of the 1920s – we turned to an older, pre-bourgeois form: baroque music and dance theatre. The question that guided us was the same one the Bauhaus had posed: what remains of theatre when you detach it from the spoken word? The compendium “Die neue und curieuse theatralische Tantz-Schul” by the Italian dance master Gregorio Lambranzi (1716) offered an answer. In one hundred copper engravings, Lambranzi catalogues the social types, trades and theatre figures of his time – courtly dancers alongside Commedia dell’Arte characters, market criers beside cavaliers. What he describes is a world in which music, dance and acting had not yet been separated: theatre as total body language, in which the spoken word is the superfluous element.

Inspired by these engravings and their baroque aesthetic, Theater der Klänge resurrected Lambranzi’s troupe of dancers and comedians – in a sequence of twenty-four scenes combining courtly baroque dances, folk dances, dance parodies, masked play and the figure of dance master Lambranzi himself. The semi-open itinerant stage, candlelight, opulent costumes, Commedia masks and a newly composed theatrical music produced a Gesamtkunstwerk that was not a reconstruction – but a contemporary theatre piece on the foundations of a buried tradition.

Since its premiere on 6 April 1989 at the Malkasten in Düsseldorf, the Baroque Theatre of Masks has been realised in five different versions. Each newly assembled ensemble improvised with the inherited materials, figures, lazzi and dances, producing a fresh version on the same aesthetic foundation. In 1993, a street theatre version toured to the Festival d’Avignon. A total of 55 performances across seven venues were seen by approximately 10,000 audience members. This decade-long work with masks – a central element of ensemble training from 1988 to 1999 – led in 1994 to the original creation Reden ist Silber… and in 1999 to the figure of Harlequin in Die Neuberin.

Funded by: City of Düsseldorf, State of North Rhine-Westphalia, Institut Français Düsseldorf