Vanitas

Year & Context

2012

25th Anniversary Production

About the Production

VANITAS – Sound and Smoke was created for the 25th anniversary of THEATER DER KLÄNGE and was at the same time its 20th production. The premiere took place on the founding date itself – 10 May 2012 at the FFT Juta in Düsseldorf, the very house where the ensemble had first performed in 1987. What remains of a quarter century of theatre work? Hans Curjel, once dramaturg at the Krolloper Berlin, named the fundamental condition: “It is the tragedy of every theatre performance that it passes like a dream. The music fades, the visible disappears. Nothing of the immeasurable labour, nothing of the tears, nothing of the joys remains tangible.” Vanitas – the vanity and transience of human endeavour – is the evening’s leitmotif; the baroque poet Andreas Gryphius compressed it into a single formula: All is vain.

The piece approaches this question not as commemoration but as an intermedial composition: music, theatre, dance, interactive video and light combine into a stream of images that turns and returns the themes of beauty and decay, fame and forgetting, closeness and failure. Overcoming transience – by holding, repeating, by letting the moment become image or sculpture – produces theatrical beauty alongside grotesque scenes and dance-musical poetry in equal measure.

In 25 scenes the ensemble unfolds a panorama of appearances: a violinist who raises the bow again and again but produces no sound, meanwhile reviewing his career – what remains of 10,000 hours of practice? Only sound and smoke. Aerobic routines that tip into exhaustion. A dancer with a wedding dress on a mannequin. A photographer demanding poses from his performer. A couple whose tender lift gradually becomes a brutal toss. Situations break, moods shift – again and again. The empty stage is bounded at the back by several layers of gauze, from whose shadow the performers slowly emerge for their scenes. At the close a trio dances, to a distant music with a rear projection behind them, slowly into infinity.

At the end the ensemble projects words onto the white screen: parallelism, routine, symmetry, infidelity, flight, homecoming — associations from 25 years of theatre work. The last line of the evening: “I die — so do you.”

Joy turns to sorrow, / beauty falls like a flower, / the greatest strength grows weak. — Recitative from J. S. Bach BWV 26

Funded by the Kulturamt der Landeshauptstadt Düsseldorf and the Stiftung van Meeteren.