Of death, life and freedom

From Verdun to Auschwitz and Hiroshima, death spread its mantle over people, about 90 million were handed over to it in a period of barely 50 years, the first half of the 20th century. Elias Canetti was a contemporary witness of these enormous mass exterminations and in his works there are traces of the confrontation, which to follow can broaden the intellectual horizon considerably. In his radio play "Die Befristeten" (The Limited), written in 1953, he tells of a society that confirms itself in the delusion of having achieved greater security, satisfaction and control through knowledge of the lifespan. An unmistakably fascist approach that corresponded to the zeitgeist agreed upon in the National Socialist idea, which classified the lives of others and dealt with them as it saw fit. And this despite the fact that the original idea for the work came from the seemingly simple process of reading destiny from the lines of a hand. The use of presumption and faith should serve to convey certainty. "Death as a threat is the coin of power. It is easy to place coin upon coin here and accumulate enormous capital. Whoever wishes to come to terms with power must set his eyes unabashedly on the command and find the means to deprive it of its sting." (Mass and Power, E. Canetti) Man's fear in life, for his life, is omnipresent and as all-encompassing as is probably the overtaxing of this very thing. The process of encountering existential fear is kept in motion by the generation of power and oppression. Here the individual and the mass meet in equal measure. In an age, in which the destruction of all life and the entire planet earth is possible by the technical armaments, the fear takes on disproportionate proportions. It is suppressed and yet it is noticeably omnipresent. Its perversion creeps through society, is legitimized in places. Effects can be found in the attempt of scientific and acquirable body perfection as well as in the "forcible" preservation of life, from which the freedom for age-related self-determined death is taken away. To gain power over existence - a dream of the individual - which always degenerates in the movement of the masses. For the Biennale for New Music Theater, director Nicola Hümpel and composer Detlev Glanert took up the work "Die Befristeten" to create a production in which language, music and body were given equal attention. The piece, a sequence of scenes of everyday situations, offers not only the basic problems but also a number of points of contact that are currently being discussed in society. The starting point for this is the individual human being in his or her respective present condition, which seems to be fixed on the certainty of the day of his or her death. The rational material handling of death and the available lifetime has top priority, to which everything is subordinated. Education, choice of profession and partner and finally the fatalism with which the end is accepted as fate-given. This order, the social contract which is maintained by the Kapselan (God image or legal order representative), is considered unchangeable and is not questioned. The mass bows to the law as long as, until one questions it. By the contradiction the system begins to dissolve ... On a potter's wheel in the center of the revolving stage, designed by Oliver Proske, stood a voluptuous Venus figure made of clay, on which the capsuleer tried his hand artistically. Paul Wolff-Plottegg also explored his body, examined his arm with a close look, turned around his own axis symbolically. The music remained rather in the background, sometimes casually, like in a film, and yet underlining the moments that had to be traced. The stage began to turn, time took its course and the prospectus came into view. Yui Kawaguchi danced on the house, her movements showing subtle, almost perfect body control and acrobatic skills. This brought beauty and vulnerability into play. A group appeared from the background, stepped up to the ramp and Michaela Steiger, in a powerful voice that brooked no contradiction, explained the common beliefs. Wolfram Rupperti, Marie Seiser, Tom Radisch and Philipp Caspari embodied figures of this world, which spread out their everyday life. Götz Schulte played fastidiously, but unobtrusively the refusenik, whose conviction led to freedom. At times intentional comedy interrupted, sought applause from the audience and dissolved in the next image. Some continuations of the text into the present seemed long-winded and deliberately enlightening, quite as if celebrated in real space, dissolved in the next image. The stage, whose floor was decorated with plastic remains and not grass, carried time forward - sometimes very slowly, sometimes continuously, sometimes quickly or stopped - wall and houses changed until at the end the figures seemed to be carried through the openings into the open air. What is missing in society is the natural relationship between life and death. Fear and the repression, suppression of this very fear, paralyze change, respectively drastically limit the space of experience and brought forth in modern times a kind of android, which acts fully mechanically and, for example, fulfills time-limited contracts for power output in hamster wheels, in order to get horny, wear out and wither away, driven by the vain attempt to keep fearful power under control and to justly manufacture in platitudes empty secrecy. An equally industrial production process for the mere self-affirmation of the capsuleers - the operators of the system. The piece thus also illustrated an internal process, as it also takes place in the brains. The amygdala, the happiness center of humans atrophies to a closed capsule, in which imagination is supposed to replace a physical state of life, and, which only finds its confirmation through death, as the religions praise it. Parallel to this: The messages transmitted to the frontal lobe through the omnipresent board in front of the head guide the characters. The opening of the board-like apparatuses is forbidden (the questioning of the contents), because these are empty, they serve only the transmission of arbitrary intentional importance. Nevertheless, man seems helpless without these flat "capsules" and chaos spreads, but it would be the chaos which first made a reorganization possible. "The most dangerous thing about technology is that it distracts from what really constitutes man, from what he really needs." E. Canetti. The final images of the production had a haunting effect, showing the characters' loss to knowledge and the concomitant loss of formerly agreed upon and accepted values and guidelines. Valerie Pachner, in glasses and costume, stood for this - perplexed, in the face of freedom. An unmistakable call for departure into more liveliness was offered and with it the acceptance of existence per se, which is carried by interaction, the composition of classical and free elements of music and dance, vibration and movement of the creative forces. It was a stimulating production worth experiencing which the artists succeeded in realizing the diversity of a universal metaphor. The concept of mindful process-related collaboration was successful and symbolic of a possible new path. What more can a musical theater piece achieve? To say it with Elias Canetti: "Principle of art: to recover more than has been lost."

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