Massimo Furlan / Numero23Prod.

Vidéos

Schiller Thriller

a project by Massimo Furlan and Claire de Ribaupierre
16e Internationale Schillertage Mannheim; Arsenic, Lausanne; La Bâtie – Festival de Genève; Théâtre de la Cité Internationale, Paris; NUMERO23Prod. (CH)
Creation: 9-10 June 2011, Nationaltheater Mannheim, Festival Schillertage.

Theme 

Schiller Thriller is based upon Schiller’s speech at the Jena Academy in 1789, which addressed the concept of universal history. The writer draws, for his future students and colleagues, an historical line, evolutionary and optimistic, leading to an ever brighter future. At the center of this ideal universe stands the philosopher, the enlightened guide. The European historians and philosophers of the 19th century hold this belief, committing to this logical positivism and blind faith in Universal Reason, and infinite progress. But the course of history followed another path.

In our project, this speech announcing a cloudless future is juxtaposed by Schiller’s negative and violent nightmares. Nightmares incarnated by the characters of his own tragedies, simultaneously victims and culprits: as if these literary fictions contradict the words of the professorial philosopher-historian, and put them into question.

Our work is built upon this paradox. Our images, more enigmatic rather than explicit, open on a world torn into two opposing movements, one blinded by the idea of the future, thirsty for illusion, and the other turned towards catastrophe, the repetition and amplification of murder.

These dream-images and visions, strange and burlesque, provoke shocks between these distant spaces and times in order to shed light upon, and give meaning to, one another. Instead of a linear chronology, these images play with the phenomenon of resumption and repetition.

On stage the company’s actors, accompanied by a large number of extras, children, and adults of all ages, compose this series of images in movement.

Space

The space, given our partners’ layout, should be either a large operatic stage, or a very large industrial depot. These two types of space work well for the project, knowing that a very wide and deep stage is essential for the effect of characters emerging from distant places and time, traveling a great distance to come ‘into the light’. The public will be seated unconventionally in order to create a special relationship with the images appearing before them. Each spectator can, at any moment, explore the space, making themselves part of the ‘system’. In addition, when the public enters, they will encounter an image which has already begun, as if they had entered an art installation. No opening curtain, no waiting, no opening.

Images

The Figures

From the depths of this vast, large, profound and dark space, come forth, ever so slowly, burlesque, strange, and enigmatic figures. These images refer to precise moments of the universal history that we find in Schiller’s discourse: these are type-cast figures, sorts of model figures, examples. We can also understand them as phantoms who haunt the space, coming forth from Schiller’s thoughts ; reflections of a world which is either abounds in Schillerian meaning, or contradicts or troubles it, as nightmares, repressed images, remorse. The figures of women, children, elderly, ‘savages’, take possession of the space, destabilizing the author and his system. They are also the tragic characters of the author, Karl and Carlos, excessive and violent, killers, revolutionaries, or elderly fathers, strict child-killers (Philippe II, Maximilian Von Moor), traitors (Franz, Albe) seductive women, loved but abandoned (Amalia, Elisabeth).

The compositional principles

The question of the organization of the images among themselves is very important. We’d like to place these images in a perspective which contradicts Schiller’s ‘enlightened’ system: linear knowledge, the idea of a chronological history heading towards the horizon of progress. The piece’s images contradict the idea of a beginning and an end. Instead they play with the principle of resumption and repetition, the question of the recommencement and of the loop. They are close to mythological systems based on the cycle, the circle. We’d like the spectator to come into a piece which has already begun, and leave as images seem to be starting again; the spectator experiences something which is simultaneously deja vu and a new beginning. But they are never certain, as the images are made of subtle variations; inside the images themselves, we’d like to place loops inside each loop. A system of loops which takes into account a world which equivocates and recommences, but in reality goes nowhere, a world which goes through different stages, which themselves are witness to neither progress, nor improvement. They are interchangeable.

The meaning of the images

The images themselves are polysemantic, complex in nature, and sometimes contradictory. A scene may seem to develop in one direction, but suddenly its development brings us in the opposite direction, contrary to our expectations. We wish to introduce doubt and questioning in the spectator’s mind, who cannot trust first impressions. The image is long, and in its slowness transforms itself, to surprise, deviate, and explode linearity. The images do not clarify, they obscure. The bodies cross, solitary or in groups, each following its own trajectory. As if they were indifferent to one another: sorts of body-worlds, autistic, on the brink of insanity. Each one has a certain number of actions, whose motivation we do not understand. They give off an impression of trouble, of worry. The spectator, at a given moment, finds him/her-self facing a rupture in the system, and he is invited to get up from his/her seat, and leave it to move about in the image, to mingle with the bodies of the performers , thus becoming part of the unexpected scene and perturbing the image.

Work Approach

The rehearsals for Schiller Thriller were held in May 2011 in Lausanne with the members of the company, then in Mannheim with 24 amateurs recruited locally to prepare the performances of the 8th and 9th of June, for the 16th International Schillertage.
In Autumn, the piece will be recreated based on the images developed in Mannheim, adapted to the Faubourg auditorium for the Batie Festival on the 3rd and 4th of September. The extras have been recruited in Swiss Romandy, and will also perform in the Lausanne show in May, 2012, at the Patinoire de Malley, as part of Arsenic’s exterior programming. Finally, the piece will also be recreated at the Théâtre de la Cité Internationale of Paris in Spring 2012, with Parisian extras.