In ATMEN, the middle part of the Rituals of Transformation trilogy, Nicole Beutler leads her audience into a theater hall overgrown with plants, moss, and fungi. The image of a cultural venue overtaken by nature is breathtaking.
In Nicole Beutler's award-winning production 8: Metamorphosis, performers and audience found themselves on the theater stage. Towards the end, viewers were rewarded with a memorable sight: the screen between stage and hall rose, revealing a theater bathed in mist, where a tree had sprouted among the empty seats.
This image, of nature reclaiming a human-built space, is further developed in ATMEN. Instead of just one tree, now half of ITA's Great Hall is overrun. The stage is covered with a carpet of plants, and an overgrown pile of garbage serves as a sort of catwalk extending into the hall, where multiple red plush chairs are hidden under green organisms. The audience is guided into the hall in darkness, emerging from similarly darkened theater corridors.
ATMEN not only connects to 8: Metamorphosis. The performance is the second in Nicole Beutler's ecologically activist trilogy Rituals of Transformation (towards a new humanity). In the first part, GINKGO or: 56 million years ago there were palm trees on the North Pole (2022), we saw humanity meet its end on a self-created garbage dump. ATMEN is set in the year 2200, after this ecological disaster has occurred.
In Beutler's vision of the future, the planet slowly begins to breathe again. The handful of people who survived the disaster have forgotten language. Instead, the six human figures that slowly emerge from the green background make clicking tongue sounds. The six develop other forms of communication, not through speech but through movement. It's not a crazy assumption that dance can play a role in group formation, and that's reflected here in a tribal-like choreography. And then it turns out that in the collective memory of these human survivors, there is also a remarkably clear memory of classical singing.
Relatively quickly, we see the group of human survivors re-evolve from crawling creatures covered in green plant husks to clothed people peacefully gathering around a fire pit. That evolutionary speed feels inversely proportional to the viewer's perception of time. Thanks in part to Gary Shepherd's atmospheric soundscape, the first twenty minutes are certainly worth taking the time to settle into this green world, to absorb all the details, and to see the players emerge from the background. However, afterwards, the performance feels longer than the choreographic and dramatic material justifies. Even the cleverly integrated projections by video artist Heleen Blanken, such as a magically emerging image of a white wolf, cannot disguise the fact that the performance feels static and somewhat distant. Even when the dancers and singers come close to the audience.
In addition to the compelling opening images, ATMEN also offers a beautiful final scene. On a transparent canvas, we see a projection of flowing water. Sitting with their backs to the audience, the group watches the water and the wisps of mist rising from the foreground. This image of people relating to the overwhelming nature clearly refers to Caspar David Friedrich's famous painting "Wanderer above the Sea of Fog". To underscore its highly romantic character, the performers sing lines from a poem by Friedrich's friend and kindred spirit Johann Wolfgang von Goethe:
''The soul of man Is like water It comes from the sky And rises to the sky''
Der Gesang der Geister über den Wassern, set to music by Franz Schubert, gives the performance a last-minute emotional charge that was missing before.
By Fritz de Jong.