Well, that should be some kind of experience.
A cyberized mystery play, not about Jesus, but about Jessica.
The manuscript “Bronté – der Thunder” also turned up as part of the so-called Nag Hammadi writings – a collection of early Christian texts discovered by farmers in Egypt in December 1945.
In this hymn-like self-revelation in Coptic script, a female deity describes herself in contrasts and riddles.
The titular passage reads: "I am the perfect mind and the stillness of thunder" - what this means exactly, in what context the expression stands, what it alludes to is not yet clear.
For Susanne Kennedy and her husband Markus Selg, who have been either unsettling or perplexing the German-speaking Stadttheater audience for several years with their opaque, technologically highly equipped performance works, the semantic gap means they have found what they are looking for.
They call the nameless goddess "Jessica" and declare her the guru of a fictional tech company that offers earthlings a chance to reconnect with their forgotten memories under the label "Anamnesis".
Together with her gentle partner Jude, she gathers a handful of overexcited, exhausted, meaning-seeking contemporaries for ritualized group therapy.
Almost everyone wears jeans that are cut open in different places (responsible for the extravagant costumes:
Andra Dumitrascu) and thus symbolize the different vulnerabilities of these hopelessly late moderns.
Because of their excessive consumption of American reality shows and video clips (“I watched the Kardashians for three days”), they are completely burned out and only appear as the surface of themselves.
All are skinny, all are more or less sexless.
Figures without characteristics, but still bearing the first names from the neighborhood: Mary, Andrew, John, Anna, Simone.
all are more or less genderless.
Figures without characteristics, but still bearing the first names from the neighborhood: Mary, Andrew, John, Anna, Simone.
all are more or less genderless.
Figures without characteristics, but still bearing the first names from the neighborhood: Mary, Andrew, John, Anna, Simone.
Just esotherapeutic nonsense
The whole thing takes place in a desert landscape, mostly digitally projected onto a revolving stage, in a stylized Death Valley, reputedly the "hottest and driest place on earth".
Only here and there are the remains of props that look like relics: a hearth, a horn, a washbowl.
Whenever these objects are used, for example when Jessica drips milk from her breast into the horn or begins to wash the feet of one of her disciples, it becomes turgid and absurdly blasphemous - then the self-defense of the sacred triumphs, which is not itself so easily broken down into symbolic images.
Director Susanne Kennedy, who once again appears here as a lyricist, praises this
of course - and yet she doesn't always have the smooth transitions to kitsch completely under control.
So the evening always offers what an angry disciple once slips out: "Nothing but esotherapeutic babble".
On the other hand, the moments when the “self-proclaimed guinea pigs” are placed on a stool in front of a large video wall and confronted with their own memories in a hypnotic picture loop are impressive.
The forms through which they have walked as humans are revealed here in rapid transformations, from primeval mud to monkey heads to laughing party scenes.
The pictorial flashes only briefly and then immediately transforms itself back into something organic, abstract, and undefined.
This is indeed how one can imagine our memory: as an endless stream without banks, from which here and there the loose end of a thought, the corner of a faded picture, emerges.
emotional chaos of the people
In these video sequences, produced with great effort by Markus Selg and Rodrik Biersteker, the evening briefly loses its otherwise often strained meta-claim and, through the suggestive video art, fulfills what it promises: to be an embodiment, the “incarnation” of something misunderstood .
That's what Susanne Kennedy's theater work seems to be about at the moment: finding ways to touch areas that are inaccessible to the mind - "without metaphysics, only the material remains," was the warning that evening.
The mission of "Anamnesis" is also that of the conceptual director: to express people's inner emotional chaos in pictures.
But their attempts regularly fail.
One follows their approach of a surreal cyber theater with sympathy, and yet is disappointed by the staged result.
With a lot of effort, the mysterious is built up here, but there is no secret behind it.
This evening is too long, too vague.
And then the technology also fails, as if it were just as exhausted by the chaos in this world as the people on stage.
That is definitely a punch line on this evening, which alternates between tech criticism, ritual performance and computer game simulation: If you imagine God as a "programmer" and the devil as a "hacker", then no work can succeed, then it remains a contribution to the general transcendental homelessness.