Composition | Contemporary Dance Theatre 
A production of Dorky Park and Volksbühne Berlin, 2023

Directed by Constanza Macras
Dramaturgy: Carmen Mehnert
Composition: Robert Lippok
Stage: Simon Lesemann
Costumes: Eleonore Carrière

With: Candaş Bas, Alexandra Bódi, Emil Bordás, Campbell Caspary, Fernanda Farah, Thulani Lord Mgidi, Shiori Sumikawa, Miki Shoji, Knut Vikström Precht, Moritz Lucht

In DRAMA, a group tirelessly explores the possibilities and limits of the stage space in our current post-pandemic era, where user:ins have become the content of social media.

On a real theatre stage, it still seems that what works most safely is what the audience already knows. Shakespeare? Sophocles? Again? With suits? The performers question and examine different genres, which they fuse into a recreation of the theatre genre „La Revista Argentina“: a mixture of cabaret and revue with French glamour, catchy Spanish-language music, the humour of Italian immigrants, lots of feathers, big musical numbers and famous comedians. „La Revista Argentina“ was created during the Weimar Republic, at the same time Buster Keaton presented The Enchanted House, where criminals and bad actors from a mediocre Faust meet by chance.

The characters in DRAMA oscillate between an anthropological need to carve up pop culture in order to find the tension between a high and low art and the coloured endurance of the glamour dancers: inside the Argentine revue of the 1920s. Despite the genre being considered populist and superficial, they perform with Spartan stamina and without flinching in pain. The atmosphere gains another dimension with Robert Lippok’s music, which contrasts with the musical references of pop songs.

Performers: inside compete with the depleted attention span of an audience in the era of clickbait. How can one compete with the constant spectacle that politics and news, fake or real, provide? Drama is no longer just in the theatre, it’s everywhere. Joseph Campbell’s making amends with the father is the root and repetition of endless heroic stories of a patriarchal nature, but are these heroic journeys even a reflection of the male director with a father complex?