White Out - Begegnungen am Ende der Welt

White out - skiers and mountaineers know what it is: the brightness created by snow-covered ground and subdued sunlight peeping through clouds, fog or falling snow.  Everything flows seamlessly into everything else, there is no horizon, there are no contours or shadows any more, and the completely empty and boundlessly extending grey space is disquieting. We lose all sense of direction.

The main theme of this performance is people’s lethargy and resignation as the end of the world draws nigh.  Yet hope glimmers through the fog. "Radical hope is not so much something we possess, it is rather something we do; it requires flexibility and candour. Radical hope is our best weapon against despair, even if despair seems appropriate" (from the Luzern Theatre programme notes, after Jonathan Lear).

There is no coherent plot to this visual poem.  Disjointed, fragmentary stories are suggested.  After the agonisingly lengthy beginning, during which a man lists in detail the specifications of emergency gear, going so far as to announce the weight and calories of food, the evening then draws the audience into its irresistible spell.  The stage is an apocalyptic ash-grey landscape.  As a spectator, I surrender to these surreal images from unseen realms of surpassing beauty.  Everything slows down, moving away from rational drama; I make mental associations, I speculate, I marvel, everything is sensual, describing the beauty of melancholy; we see the way things are, in bizarre, solipsistic and timeless images. The wealth of statistical information and the text passages between the uncommented scenes disrupt the prettified images and bring the theatrical kaleidoscope resolutely back to our reality. The effect is genuinely dramatic and the striking images stick in our mind.

The director and video artist Alexander Giesche, working together with the actors, has developed pictorial stories on the borderline between sound and light installations, theatre and performance. 

(Jean Grädel)

• distrib

  Direction
  Alexander Giesche 

  With
  Lukas Darnstädt, Matthias Kurmann, Verena Lercher, Maximilian Reichert, Jakob Leo Stark, Alina Vimbai Strähler                 

  Stage design and costumes
  Nadia Fistarol

  Light
  David Hedinger

  Dramaturgy
  Friederike Schubert

  Music
  Georg Conrad

  Production
  Luzerner Theater

  Surtitles (french)
  Juliane Regler 

   

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