At the signal of a siren, a gate opens and the Eloi move in a trance into the maw hidden behind it, where they are eaten by the Morlocks. No one is eaten in Darmstadt, but the scene is similar to George Pal's ‘Time Machine’ (1960) when, after a long time in the auditorium, the iron curtain rises and the audience begins its journey into the depths of the stage.
The third stage of ‘Freedom Collective’ comes to a close with the premiere at the Staatstheater Darmstadt. In line with NOperas!, this production has also ‘evolved’ along the way. The diversity of the three stages alone demanded a different spatial concept for each.
The project now also seems to me to have made progress in its exploration of what emerged early on as a kind of fundamental conflict: with its setting of a complex narrative plot, ‘Freedom Collective’ belongs to the genre of contemporary opera in terms of text and music, while on the level of stage action the production team aimed for a decidedly ‘post-narrative’ theatre that is rather distant from opera. In retrospect, what kind of theatre could be created from such opposing approaches?
To recapitulate the most important points: It is not the underground club that the libretto talks about that is depicted on stage, but a gaming situation. The performers act as gamers who lead the libretto characters as avatars. In this way, the performance largely frees itself from the conventional principle of a more precise tracing of the narrative laid out in the libretto and music. Nevertheless, every word sung in Gelsenkirchen was meticulously surtitled. Those who took this as a hook to follow all the conflicts about drugs, boxing and queerness that the plot tells of found little support in the stage action and could only fail in the end. In Bremen, this initially led to the decision not to use surtitles at all. The narrative was thus pushed even further into the background. And while the score clings to the differentiated tonal realisation of every detail of the plot, its effect seemed even more reduced to the character of an intoxicating soundscape of vocal parts and orchestral colours than in Gelsenkirchen. As on other levels of the performance, it was far more about ‘immersion’ than understanding.
Between narration and non-narration, the conflicting poles of this production, a balance now seems to have been found in Darmstadt that does not eliminate the contradictions of antagonistic approaches, but balances them against each other and in this way creates a productive tension. The surtitles are back, but they are set more generously, no longer trailing every libretto word every second. The music – certainly not an easy decision – has been shortened by several passages, freeing the performance from the ballast of some peripheral and barely transportable content within this theatre, which aims to tell rather than capture. In return, the gamers merge a little more with their avatars, and the opera plot is transferred to them more strongly. In Darmstadt, you don’t know where you actually are, in the computer game or in the underground club, and this uncertainty is transferred to the visitors not as a shortcoming, but as the inextricability of simultaneous levels of reality.
As in the previous theatres, ‘Freedom Collective’ in Darmstadt will be presented under the label ‘immersive music theatre’. Such a claim was already made in the project application at the time: theatre-goers should not be viewers of the stage action, but become part of it. Above all, the director focussed on eliminating the separation of stage and auditorium. The actors should be in the centre of the audience and the audience should be able to move freely. This approach is now opposed by safety regulations in Darmstadt’s large theatre. As the project progressed, the part of the concept that promised immersion in a completely different way faded into the background. Theatre was to be expanded to include new media, and key content additions were to be available on a mobile phone app during the performance. A lot of work was put into this app, which was developed especially for this production by SWR’s Experimentalstudio. Nevertheless, in the end it lacked the flexibility to be used in more diverse ways and ultimately to be much more than a gadget that had little influence on the dramaturgy and perception of the performance.
So how much remains ‘immersive’ in Darmstadt? A course leads the audience from the foyer first in front of the closed iron curtain and from there later onto the stage with a now reversed view into the stalls – not an entirely new effect, but still an effective one for questioning the theatre as a machine of illusion. From this moment on, with three quarters of the performance still to go, ‘Freedom Collective’ becomes veritable peep-box theatre. If it weren’t otherwise on the programme – so what? you might ask. The characterisation has been refined compared to earlier stages; the depth of the space is played with effectively; the 3D animations appear to be effectively expanded with additional material; a clever lighting direction sets caesuras based on the music and Darmstadt’s lighting department is allowed to sparkle with all the lighting technology a theatre like this has. The audience appears impressed after the end of the performance. However, they frown at the mobile phones during the opening night discussions. Due to the expectations that were fuelled here, but hardly fulfilled, some people felt a little teased. Should they have decided to throw the mobile phones out last? Then there would have been little left of the concept that the NOperas! jury had chosen.
Before a favourable review appeared in the FAZ after some delay, the press did not mean well by the performance. Unlike Helga and Horst, critics try to inform themselves thoroughly before attending the performance, read explanations of the libretto content and also read the magic word ‘immersive’. They hardly find enough of either in the performance and, misguided in their criteria, they then do the maths. But if the Experimental Music Theatre Fund is right to bear its name, the end is always open. Wherever the aim is to facilitate ‘piece development’, pre-announcements run the risk that everything will turn out quite differently from what was initially envisaged. Many of the announcements about ‘Freedom Collective’ have long been published in annual magazines. Others, which fuelled false expectations right up to the end, could have been avoided – we will probably have to be more careful here in future.
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