Bekannte Gefühle, gemischte Gesichter

This evening entitled Bekannte Gefühle, gemischte Gesichter (Familiar Feelings, Mixed Faces) was created to mark Christoph Marthaler’s personal farewell to the Castorf Era at Berlin’s Volksbühne. It uses many songs and few words to produce a meditation on transience in the theatre and what happens to artists as they are used up: what do sell by dates mean? What do freezes and endless repetitions lead to? And how do organizational aspects and art impact on each other?

At the same time the evening is a staged exhibition of actors and episodes from a variety of Christoph Marthaler’s Volksbühne produc-tions and a collage of vocal and other music by composers including Handel, Satie, Mahler and Schubert.

In the museum space designed by Anna Viebrock (modelled on the Kunstmuseum in Basel) a delivery of transport crates containing art exhibits is opened and unpacked by one of the museum’s employees. The objects the crates contain turn out to be the performers who have helped to devise and perform Marthaler’s many productions. Now they are put on pedestals as exhibits. Of course they don’t stay there. Instead – while trying to find an exit – they start inventing their own world of nonsense, memories, eccentric melancholy, joy and music, leading in the end to a single word of farewell: “Danke” (Thank you).