The performance "Atmen" takes place in a theater overtaken by nature. Theater maker Nicole Beutler takes her audience on a journey to a possible future, where our planet slowly catches its breath after a climate disaster.
Fritz de Jong October 18, 2023, 03:00
In 2021, Nicole Beutler (Munich, 1969) announced that she would exclusively create performances about the climate crisis for four years. However, that did not fully succeed: she also made an acclaimed performance in between that revolved around Arnon Grunberg's dance shame. Nevertheless, this did not compromise the planning of her trilogy "Rituals of Transformation (Towards a New Humanity)". The choreographer had actually taken a step towards this environmental cycle in 2019 with "Our House Is On Fire". "That famous statement by Greta Thunberg felt so urgent. My daughter, who was fifteen at the time, said: I still want to be a mother and grandmother someday. Then I realized: that's in 30 or 60 years, what will the world look like then? In that performance, I wanted to be activist and only say that, in different ways: our house is on fire."
In the first part of the triptych, the dance opera "Ginkgo or: 56 million years ago there were palm trees on the North Pole" (2022), the fire has already extinguished. "In that performance, we bid farewell to humanity. The performers try to lead a normal life on a huge pile of stuff, a kind of garbage dump. When they realize it's too late to save anything, they make a kind of altar of all those objects, and that becomes a mountain into which they disappear. The piece ends with a beautiful scene: a world without people."
With "Atmen," the second performance of the trilogy, Beutler depicts a world thereafter. "In the year 2200, the theater has been taken over by nature. I try to paint a picture of a landscape, of a state where humans emerge from the shadows. With adapted behavior, more attentive to the environment. A new human who does not return to nature, but moves forward to nature."
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