World in the Head

The video opera „Memory“ at the Neumarkt Theater is fun. Art meets skill, choreography meets moving images, and yesterday meets today. A man in the background ensures that this also sounds good: techno legend Cosmic Baby.

When the term „memory“ is mentioned, one immediately thinks of hard drives and RAM, and everywhere else of a puzzle 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 glorious times (German national soccer team), in romanticized rock songs („Summer of 69“), or in the form of cheap movies („I Was a Teenage Zappadoing“).

When it comes to more complex topics related to the past, simple minds like footballers, rock stars, and filmmakers are no longer sufficient – then the professionals must step in. For example, the Neumarkt Theater, whose current contribution to the Zurich Theater Festival builds a memory edifice from a variety of creative building blocks. The work is called „Memory“ and presents itself as a video opera, or more precisely, a video-speech opera, since there is no singing. Based on the documentary film „Mit Haut und Haar“ by Crescentia Dünsser and Martin Döcker, in which six elderly women recount their lives, the performances on the Neumarkt stage are grouped around three large screens on which three of the six elderly women speak. In front of, between, behind, and beside it, new spaces of memory are constantly emerging, spanned by the (partially distorted) statements of the retired screen actresses, live music, film monologues recited and supplemented with dialogue, and freely choreographed dance. Video camera-frozen shots of parts of the three actors‘ bodies contribute to the overall picture, as does the string quartet, working with stoic calm in the center of the stage.

A superb theatrical spectacle, then, that was created under the trowel of director Otto „The Man in Black“ Kukla. Enlivened by lively, unpretentious acting and staged with a not inconsiderable array of technology.

THE SECRET STAR of the evening, however, is not to be seen on stage: Harald Blüchel, composer of the „Memory“ music. Under his moniker Cosmic Baby, the Berlin-based artist celebrated considerable success in the emerging techno scene of the early 1990s, for example at Mayday 2 in Cologne or five years ago at the Street Parade in Zurich. Subsequently, he allowed techno music, encircled by commercial garbage, to increasingly fade into the background and turned to more challenging compositions.

With the soundtrack to this video opera, Cosmic Baby once again demonstrates his astonishing versatility.Slowly crystallizing memories; music that tugs and plucks, occasionally threatening to burst, yet culminates in soothingly minimal rhythms.Concentrated, concise, sophisticated – with such accompaniment, even operas are fun.

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

Text: Philippe Amrein