World in your head

The video opera “Memory” at the Neumarkt Theater is fun: art meets skill, choreography meets moving images and yesterday meets today. One man in the background ensures that it all sounds good: techno legend Cosmic Baby.

When you hear the word “memory”, you immediately think of hard disks and working memory, and sometimes of a memory game. The English term behind it stands for memory. In everyday life, we constantly encounter social and artistic explorations of memory – whether as wistful reminiscences of more glorious times (German national football team), in glorified rock songs (“Summer Of 69”) or in the form of cheap feature films (“I Was A Teenage Zappadoing”).

When it comes to more complex themes relating to the past, simple minds like footballers, rock stars and film people are no longer enough – then the professionals have to get involved. Take Theater Neu-markt, for example, whose current contribution to the Zurich Theatre Festival is a memory building constructed from a wide variety of creative building blocks. The work is called “Memory” and presents itself as a video opera, or more precisely as a video spoken opera, as there is no singing here. Based on the documentary film by Crescentia Dünsser and Martin Döcker “Mit Haut und Haar”, in the course of which six old women talk about their lives, the actions on the Neumarkt stage are grouped around three large screens on which three of the six old women have their say.

In front of, in between, behind and next to it, new spaces of memory are constantly being created, spanned by the (partly distorted) statements of the screen pensioners, live music, film monologues added to dialogs and freely choreographed dance. Frozen shots of the three actors’ bodies taken with a video camera contribute to the overall picture, as does the stoically calm string quartet positioned in the middle of the stage. A great theatrical spectacle, then, that has been raised under the trowel of director Otto “The Man in Black” Kukla. Enlivened by lively, unpretentious acting and staged with a not inconsiderable amount of technology.

THE HOME STAR of the evening is, of course, not on stage: Harald Blüchel, composer of the “Memo-ry” music. Under his battle name Cosmic Baby, the Berliner-by-choice celebrated great success in the up-and-coming techno scene of the early nineties, for example at Mayday 2 in Cologne or five years ago at the Street Parade in Zurich. He then let techno music, which was surrounded by commercial garbage, slide more and more into the background and turned to more demanding compositional work.

With the soundtrack to this video opera, Cosmic Baby once again demonstrates its astonishing versatility, slowly crystallizing memories; music that tugs and plucks, sometimes threatening to burst and yet flowing into calming, minimal rhythms. Concentrated, concise, sophisticated – with such background music, even operas are fun.

World premiere: June 29, 8 p.m., further performances: June 30 – July 3 Theater Neumarkt, Zurich.

Text: Philippe Amrein