Peymann inszeniert neues Handke-Stueck

	t '		Ex-Burgdirektor Claus Peymann wird die urspruenglich fuer das Wiener Akademietheater geplante und im Herbst nach Berlin verlegte Urauffuehrung von Peter Handkes U-Bahn-Monolog "Untertagblues" selbst inszenieren. Dies gab das Berliner Ensemble gestern in einer Aussendung bekannt. Die Premiere ist fuer Mitte Juni oder September 2004 geplant, als "Wilder Mann" wird Michael Maertens zu sehen sein. "Untertagblues" war urspruenglich mit Gert Voss in der Hauptrolle als Festwochen-Auftragsstueck im Akademietheater geplant. Festwochen-Intendant Luc Bondy haette selbst inszeniert. Bondy: Nicht bei Festwochen Im September gab Bondy bekannt, er wolle das Stueck zum jetzigen Zeitpunkt aus privaten Gruenden nicht in Szene setzen. Eine spetere Inszenierung des "Superstuecks" ("eines der besten Stuecke von Handke seit langem") koenne er sich durchaus vorstellen, aber: "Innerhalb der Festwochen kommt das Stueck nicht mehr." Mit dem Burgtheater realisieren die Festwochen als Ausgleich eine urspruenglich nicht vorgesehene Koproduktion, den zweiten Teil einer an den Autor faelligen Zahlung uebernimmt das Berliner Ensemble.
	t

V
Sorting out UNTERTAGBLUES
Some somewhat preliminary comments, which will be reduced to its essential for my summary piece on Handke/s theater for TDR.


Rumor of a new Handke play - about a Wild Man verbally abusing passengers in the subway - reaching me in 2002 elicited a host of fantasies of what this new work might be. One hunch I
I had was that this new work, with its attack mode, might hark back to Handke/s first great success in the theater, Public Insult. Another notion of mine associated the new work to an number of sections in that mother lode Handke created for himself [and for me] with Walk About the Villages: =You are in the wrong country dear fellow. You/re in a country that is as small as it is mean: that is as full of prisoners who/ve been forgotten in their cells, and even fuller of forgetful jailkeeps who are even fatter in their offices after every infamy., with voices that sound as if death-rattle amplifiers had been built into their throats, with the arm and leg movements of poisoned grappling hooks, with eyes where killer wasps slip out with every glance.= [p. 77, Ariadne Press edition] Or the section where the =construction workers= sing their rough blues: =Stepped out of my hole into freedom and had a beer at the cellar bar/ I wasn/t quite here yet and not up to par.= [p. 44-50]
Fantasizing on, I wondered whether Subday Blues, as which the pun and its allusion to the Dylan song might be recreated in English, would explore the polarity between rage and ecstasy that is characteristic of certain Handke characters, and which we can also find among his public salvoes, and do so, here, possibly, in some balanced fashion, the Wild Man/s aggressiveness allegedly being set off in the play by a Wild Woman.
I even gave thought to the idea that a mystical resolution of the conflict might occur in the form of =love bursting through= - perhaps along the lines of those objects of endearment - the comb, the mirror the lock of hair  the sight of whose sudden appearance prevent Keuschnig from committing suicide in A Moment of True Feeling, or the grand resolution of love-life-book at the end of the Sierra del Gredos novel, as compared to a love death.
At any event, I expected to be astonished in some fashion, as I have been for nearly forty years now by a great string of performances, not once hugely disappointed, by the work, which I always accepted and judged, as Handke asks, within his own changing terms.
The concepts were frequently magnificent and magnificently delivered; occasionally, as in the case of They Are Dying Out  it was an odd kind of portmanteau whose cobbled parts are more interesting than the whole; at times he seemed too tentative; at others perhaps too much the virtuoso; occasionally grandiosity broke through; he lacked an editor his equal; didn/t do rewrites; at moments could be accused of laziness as in his recent journal of the Milosevics trial in DeHaag; in other words, so far, the upside was about 85 %; more than I could say about just about any contemporary in that field whose work I had followed these many years, and what a falling off there has been.
Although my projective fantasy was not entirely off the mark, I must admit that I failed to heed Handke/s invariable, kinesthetically re-enforced, often dissociating, sometimes mesmerizing, didactic intentions, which become especially evident when he works in the theater. Or how much of a =pro= he is in so many respects and has been from quite early on.


First of all: Physically, Subday Blues, Handke/s first play since the great political-conceptual and so unfortunate Canoe came a cropper in the wild, Danubeward-flowing rivers of the deepest darkest Serbia in 1999, is a text of twenty interlocking monologues of about ten thousand spoken words, a pro/s 90 minute film it ought to be but I think it/s closer to 180 excessive ones.
In the first nineteen scenes, a Wild Man indeed verbally abuses a variety of fungible subway passengers at fungible stations as the coach he rides circles the globe [A Station Drama is the piece/s subtitle, and not of those of The Cross]  Tirso de Molina, Schottenring, Hudi Log Zorending  Sesama  Sandvort, Rockaway Beach, etc, etc. The 2oth and final monologue, the Wild Woman/s solitary appearance, directs her attacks, as he already has started to do himself, back at him, which reminded me of Sophy/s comment in Villages:
=What you say is not permitted. Go away from here. Forever.=

And the way the WW/s eyes blazes =snake-like flashes of lighting= at =the delinquent= as she puts him into his place might indicate that the miserable WM needs little but a pretty woman to take charge of him to dispel this attack of the agues, [spellbound, overwhelmed by feminine beauty, a frequent Handkean incident since babyhood], a pretty dominatrix, because genuine blues feelings are not much in evidence in the near endless enumeration, but also sharply focused, sections that elicit the WM/s nausea-prone dissatisfactions. Handke does not so much suffer from a philosophical condition but a medical one, his thresholds are too pervious to irritation, and the excess that penetrates the lack of filters in his nervous system.  However, the polarity of outward attack and attack against the self might indicate the fulcrum of aggression on which the switch of ambivalence rests here, although the grounds for the excessive underlying aggression and irritation remain obscure; that is, unless you find yourself agreeing that the various and endless eliciting phenomena  chief among them the ugliness of the world - justify the Wild Man/s perorations; the WM finding himself at the mercy of =beauty= certainly being one reason for his dissatisfaction with the world, that he finds so much of it and its contemporaneous phenomena noxious.
Therefore, as an example of a totalizing expression of disgust with the world - Handke/s now ancient =turning inside out with nausea=- UB strikes me as both a general and specific editorial house-cleaning, perhaps final exorcism [but por que now?] of irritation with various specific and general matters that the attentive reader may have noticed grating Handke/s nausea-prone eyes and ears over these many years. Those who are new to Handke may be surprised at what makes a surrogate aspect of himself so grumpy, those who are more familiar will be reacquainted with a host of old prejudices and editorial opinions of his.
The attack begins - also in the sense of the first chord that a pianist strikes, and so much like the drum roll openings that have become characteristic of the speeches that Handke has been writing for his characters since Walk About the Villages [and which method he also takes recourse to, when he does not seem to know how to proceed, in his novels]:

[Scene 1] =And you again. And again I must be in your presence. Hallelujah. Miserere. Low tide and never a flood. You damned inevitable ones. If only you were real criminals. No such luck: without being especially criminal you are yet the creeps of creeps. Relieve me of your creepiness. Make me avoid you. At least once, for one moment. Heavenly such a moment would be, heavenly. Scarcely out of my house, I must be with you once again. Scarcely have I stepped out of my garden door, am I forced to move in your company.= The Gestus of the speech  it haunts the translator of Walk About the Villages meanwhile- is that of the mother lode. =Out of my sight, out of my hearing and my nose. I am trembling? Yes, I am trembling. I am trembling because of you? Yes, I am trembling because of you. Am I trembling because of my respect of you? How nice it would be if that were the case. If I could tremble in front of you if you were royalty, farmers or workers. But nothing of you reminds me of worker, of farmer or a king. I am trembling and shivering in front of you. It/s shaking me, and it is not because of the subway ride. I am shuddering because of you. But this horror is not, as once upon a time, because I am awed, but because of my disgust. I am standing here and can do no other but be nauseated, de profundis, by you.=

Scene 2: =Christ man, how can you stand yourself? Why don/t you jump out of your skin, out and away to the star of the unborn? Away with you into your hollow tree trunk, into your darkroom, into your crater on the moon, into your acid bath=

In Scene 3 the reader is told: =Hey you there, what kind of reading is that that makes your lips grow thin, even thinner ones than you had previously= What a sight! An authentic reader. And you etc etc. Hey you, keep your distance from books=

Scene 4: =I understand you. You have every reason in the world to be sad. Your situation is hopeless. Your future? A cloud as black as that emitted by an inkfish.=

Scene 5: =Nightmare creatures! At one time, you miserable ones at least were in form. There was even the particular beauty of those who were beyond hope, and not only on black and white photographs. Ah, their clear features=

Scene 6: =Ah, there was a kind of laughter at one time that gave you legs. That made you grow wings.  if only for a moment=

Scene 7: =My dear, hideously ugly contemporaries, monstrous to behold How beautiful I was once upon a time. How green was my valley. How high was my sky. How delicate the bones in my hands. How my eyes lighted up and my shoes glistened... Oh, you should have seen me when I was still without you as I watched the sky grow pink entirely by myself. = You, dear people, at least know how to live with your ugliness. You were born with it.=

Scene 8: =Oh I who am thrice ugly. At the sight of your thin lips my lips grow three times as thin. At the sight of your rotten tooth three times three of my teeth drop out of my mouth. At the sight of your dandruff my entire body is covered with dandruff=

Scene 9: =Hey there you two pretty ones. It is obvious the two of your regard yourselves as a pretty couple. And as better and more beautiful than your fellow passengers.=

Scene 10: =You, your camouflage won/t help you one bit. It/s all over with the incognito. . Far too often you have invoked the name of your god=


The central scene, # 11, is the piece de resistance of the play, passion flows, and perhaps because this great demolition derby against the masters of the world, hooks up with Handke/s now hate of a childhood chum who has become an Austrian administrator in the former Yugoslavia, and who, Handke feels, participated in the infamy that was the =Ramboulliet Accords= that led to the Kosovo campaign and destruction of the Serbian infrastructure.
It may be unfair to hold Handke to his wish to =write everything you write with passion,= as so much of his work is, but the only instance where I sense some particularly deep personal passion is in this scene, up a notch from the customary misanthropic misogynists fulmination against the modern woman that will follow shortly.

=Have the honor, the universal prize winner in our coach! But why didn/t you stay home in your laboratory or wherever... Ah, how expensively your shoes squeak as they tread the parquet from Versailles to Potsdam... Even as an infant you suckled like a future dignitary at your mother/s breast, oh you suckling, oh how officiously you burped even then = You scarecrows in the fruitless fields of the so-called world public space, scare crows yet unable to fly, birds caught in your own net. Of your own making. Nothing flutters on you any more. No fluttering of your hands at the hourly appraisal of the status of the world on TV. No flutter of your tongue at your imprecation of freedom, democracy, rainforest and ozone filter. Not even your eyelashes flutter any more  the lashes are more like the coarse hairs of a pig = Ah, all you world prizewinners who talk the world to death with your journal entries and in your journals, daily op-eds, and nightly talk shows.=
Perhaps Handke/s ex-friend will reply in kind, after more than a decade of intensive study of Handke/s person and his oeuvre I myself could write quite a litany; except that Handke himself already wrote it long ago, and in a kindlier more humorous fashion  qualities that the Wild Man lacks  in Walk About the Villages.

Scene 12: =You would have remained nothing but furniture movers your whole life=

Scene 13: =Listen: you haven/t become a holy man just by sitting still. Ah, if only...=

Scene 14: =I managed to escape your kind of love, woman. You didn/t manage to entrap me. You won/t trick me into your tender trap. Seduce someone else. I managed to elude you each and every time. The way you/re the heels of your high heeled shoes clatter on the pavement: at once I dash over to the other side of the street. The clattering of your high heels is the only rhythm you control= is a near entire steal from a section in Villages. The =modern woman,= then has the prospect of loneliness in recompense for her =independence.=

Scene 15 attacks each and every mode of fashion and dress

Scene 16 & 17: =Why are you today so uniformly hideous? You are everywhere. How can there be so many of you? Away with you, you superfluities.

Scene 18: =You there, with your kid tied to your breast during the entire trip: what has you child done that it must look at its mother all day long.? And you with your uptight lawyers face: what kind of laws  How hideously quiet you are: who would have thought there could be such an ugly quiet?=

Scene 19: =Finally by myself, alone. Not one person. No one, oh no one. Awesome. Magnificent. Finally the ride feels worthy of a human Paradisiacally alone..=
#

I expect that most theater goers will certainly be befuddled by what/s on the Wild Man/s mind; a halfway gentle escapee from the one lunatic asylum into another. Perhaps Handke planned to find yet another way to estrange the audience, for it to see the patterns of how the world functions, but UB strikes me as the obverse of Hour, all the noise that has been so relievedly removed from that plaza, appears here in concentrated fashion.
#

So who is this so literate Wild Man, it occurred to me to wonder at a certain point.
First of all, he is a persona created by his author/s imagination, an imagination that feeds of the observations of the =sight collector= Peter Handke  a solipsism which the Wild Man evidently cannot elude. Those somewhat familiar with Handkes work may feel like asking: is he the same person as the suicidal Keuschnig of A Moment of True Feeling; the murderous, poster and spider destroying amok-runner Loser of the 1983 novel Across [Der Chinese des Schmerzens], the self-disgusted =naked ego= of Handke/s note-book novel Weight of the World and the parallel, so musical, poems of Nonsense and Happiness? Is he perhaps also A Lefthanded Man? This Wild Man is certainly as finicky as the misanthropic restaurateur of No-Man/s Bay, who moves further and further into the woods to escape the wrong guests  thither bankruptcy lies. Yet here he has come =out of his garden= into the =underworld,= and perhaps it was Handke/s engagement in the great political drama Canoe that pointed the way down into the nitty gritty of the everyday. Or, is our man =off his meds,= as they say about Newt Gingrich? I recall a statement from the time of the Yugoslav controversies, to - or quoted by - an FAZ writer, that Handke had resolved to rejoin the contemporary world. If it means going underground, so be it. But isn/t our man supposed to have a new =main squeeze?= However, Subday Blues does not seem like the product of a man in love. Perhaps, he simply needed to show something, that he is still =a player.=

This Wild Man, of course, first and foremost, is a contemporaneous and eternal stage creature; and as stage creature he bears a variety of traces to Handke/s and literature/s [especially Austrian literature/s] most amusing creations: for one he is the all around pest, the nuisance of a minority stockholder Franz Kilb from They Are Dying Out, the gnat in the navel of the economy; he/s a clown who however seems to keep only himself amused, with his performance in the subway, until he reaches =the end of the line=. The WM is also the Handke of the occasionally utterly outraged and outrageous public and private pronouncements; in other words, he has been touched by Dr. Tourette, and as such is an equal opportunity offender, and was so already with the collection of insults at the end of Public Insult, those chords of beautiful musical jokes that induce the audience to attend a lesson of what it means to be self-conscious in the theater.
Handke can be the General Wesley Clark who bombed every site ten times in Yugoslavia until not a blade of grass will ever grow there again; but here wields the pettiest of fine-toothed louse-combs, and not one louse escapes the squeezing, including the main louse himself. Yet he is no Lenny Bruce - far harsher and more incendiary language might have been employed, the tetchy realms of the scatological and sexual; the author, earthy language can be the ruralist/s middle name, maintains certain linguistic parameters here, which his character/s insults and derisiveness will not cross.  Are we still in Handke/s mythopoeic post-1980 world? The only concrete hint of something along those lines is that subway tube that circles the world, indicating what? A monotonousness without a horizon of any kind? Perhaps the staging of it will be in harsh, unforgiving white neon.
Linguistically, however, as the quotes I hope have indicated, we are in something of a poetic world, which is somehow both callow and exuberant: disgust with language so surprising on the part of someone who used it with great precision from early on - is not in evidence in UB as it was during the first decade or so of Handke/s work; Handke/s repertoire and the pleasure The Wild Man takes in his virtuoso use of it demonstrate that in that respect there is no reversion to status quo ante the inception of the Slow Homecoming cycle, because if you are insulted as delightfully, when SB is delightful and not plain ordinary, you might be fascinated and spellbound by that delight. The experience however, is bound to be as unsettling as some of Handke/s more aggressive earlier texts. They are all unsettling of course, but Lake Constance & My Foot My Tutor, and Hour manage that objective in a more pleasurable and entrancing and playful way than Public Insult or the sometimes so noisy and tortured Kaspar, some of those plays insinuate themselves without needing to resort to charm; UB is as I said above: General Wesley Clark and his louse comb.
#
The stage directions nowhere indicate that the passengers respond to these sometimes to improbable insults and observations, and this makes me infer that these passengers are just cardboard figures. Some of the WM/s sayings hint that he regards himself as someone who can =read= people as he might a book; nor does the WM himself at any time actually seek to engage the passengers in conversation - in lieu of berating them - or wait for a reply, except in the conversation that is evidently transpiring, projectively, inside his own logorrheic noggin. Nor do the passengers ever try to engage him in conversation; except in his own last scene [# 19] where he is entirely by himself and becomes so lonely that he and his alter ego start to converse. Perhaps he is as lonely as he thinks the =the modern woman= is. Handke has always taken projective identification to its limits, with the courage of some of the great anthropomorphizes of the past, although I think the time may have come for a deeper understanding of the process and what it tells us about him.
The passengers, in other words, are proxies for the audience; and if you follow the implications of the stage directions - which call for the Wild Man to address and buttonhole the passengers - it would seem that the WM has his back to these folk; certainly he does not face the audience as a performance artist would; his statements echo at the theater audience off - that is, via the station or tube or coach walls. The whole piece can be regarded as an aside. - Will the audience remain as passive and well-behaved as their surrogates? UB is a Walter Mitty fantasy where you get on a soapbox of your mind and pummel all the folks that irritate you and tell them off without their being able to answer back; the difference between that fantasy and reality being that Handke has the talent to turn these fantasies into an aria of sorts and have it mounted.
#
In its wish to control, UB resembles PI whose stage directions call for total control. That makes UB cute just the way PI is: the author has his rich Sacher Torte of insults, and gets away scot free; the author has a surrogate do the insulting, and in this instance has another character, the Wild Woman, take it all back by speaking for the audience, thus providing the author with all the caveats he needs. However, this echoing from the bowels of the Oracle of Dordona is the only indirection and cushioning afforded the so abused audience, although in the form of a patter of greater and more continuous refinement than with the insults at the end of Public Insult. The WM also has a certain Kafkaesque provenance it occurs to me; he could easily step out of a variety of those texts.
Yet, anyone so addressed, and with such trivia, by such a Wild Man in a subway would probably find the WM chiefly disconcerting; weird, but essentially harmless. To play in London or New York, the text would need to be re-invented, not just adapted. Considering these comparatively innocuous and frequently esoteric insults compared, that is, to the kinds of insults that normally trigger powerful responses - it is difficult to conceive of an audience, even an audience residing in a thoroughly cushioned underground, not quickly tuning out, unless, perhaps, you close your eyes and concentrate entirely on the playful verbal flourishes of the our loquacious WM.
#
If not qualitatively excessive, despite the fact that the topics vary from scene to scene, there is a quantitative excess of what you might call a bass line of negativity that runs through each and every scene, ad infinitum. For, if only because of the hortatory quality of the grammatical structure of the staccato attack in which these sentences are cast, the piece quickly acquires the annoyingly nonbenign effect of ranting as opposed to the great pleasures that certain other kinds of monotonousness afford  think of My Foot My Tutor to stay within the Handkean realm; UB certainly irritated me initially, also for its pettiness; closer focus on the language on repeated readings opened up the piece/s sometime linguistic magic.

The play is not unperformable, except of course by an extraordinarily versatile singer/ actor, but it would seem to be fairly unabsorbable at one sitting.
#

Handke, in most of his plays, usually raises a contemporaneously challenging problem, of both dramatic and of a political if archeo-political nature - brilliantly as the problem of theater in the age of film, as previously indicated, was handled in Canoe - and solves it with his usual conceptual aplomb. Therefore, what I find most puzzling about UB is the absence of a serious dramatic problem that asks to be solved, unless UB is also meant as Handke/s twist on the field of performance art. But though a standup comedian of sorts the WM certainly is, and though the hideous laugh factories would be quickly out of business featuring this kind of Wild Man, I see nothing all that novel or formally challenging in turning performance art into this kind of art-art. Enlighten me.
As a concept it lacks, for me, the comparative and great strength of just about all his previous plays. Not that the concept of a subway madman is the worst possible conceit for getting off on assembling a finely honed mesh of insults and editorial critiques; but Handke could as easily have used the figure from Hour that goes voicelessly screaming insults around the plaza on which that sublime play is staged; or a bus passenger Handke/s descriptions of bus passengers in No-Man/s-Bay!
What/s missing for this Wild Man to become sympathetic - which would mean his not simply being our author/s tool - and I know how unfair it is to hold the mirror of a writer/s own or any other/s work up to him or her - is the spontaneity and discontinuity that mark the madness of the Forest Madman/Woyzeck figure in Canoe: that man/s life history, filled with such an abundance of moral absurdities, provides some idea why that person [or any person like him] goes mad. This mad Wild Man all we know about him must be inferred from his presentation - is linguistically adroit, his control of grammar never breaks down; he talks to himself in the empty subway car at the end, when there is no one else to berate, but he is still talking in grammatically sound sentences, he doesn/t stutter. Unlike Kaspar, UB has no Lear screaming the equivalent of =Goats and Monkeys= over and over at the end. Nor does the WM appear moved, or truly sorrowful. Nor is his nausea ever of sufficient strength to pierce the threshold of restraints to make him literally puke - those particular codes of physiognomic communication have to be supplied by the performer and the director, who, in this instance, have a more difficult and I think less enviable task than does the actor for the tour de force that is Kaspar.
The WM is never stopped short by shocked reflection on what he has just said. The WM is not psychotic, he/s just plain nasty and unpleasant and infinitely small-minded. The German ordinaer and the English word ordinary, though apparently cognate, are anything but - nothing is ever as ordinary as the German ordinaer, just as the German Prolet is vilely proletarian whereas the equivalent English is comparatively neutral, as different as the history of class and politics in central Europe and the United States. - Handke, in other words, uses as a foil the kind of person whom he thoroughly abhors, who may fill him - so intent on squeezing a bit of nobility out of miserable existence - with nausea. Talking about a range from the noble to the shallow, I find it also odd that around the time [early 21st century] that Handke composed this text he did that fine and occasionally goosed-up [with evanescent expressions] translation of Oedipus.
#
I don/t doubt that the piece will have the desired thoroughly disconcerting effect on the audience, but if there is a one in that audience who can absorb as much as half of these slings and arrows without being rapidly benumbed I have my own very special prize for that theater goer. It almost seems that UB is something left over from the days of the great conceptual work of the 1966-1971 period, and not from the top drawer. But unlike Hour, which waited for itself with bated breath for 15 years, UB may have been pulled out of the drawer for lack of a better idea, subsequent to several dog/s lives of noting how ugly the world can appear.
Formally, Handke is still in form; he is still a great joiner and assemblage artist, in matters large and small he weaves and woofs himself a serviceable web, it/s just that some of the threads themselves, meanwhile, are somewhat threadbare. The piece has an overall arc, although I don/t think it would suffer from being half as long, yet a certain dure it must have, too. But for me UB seems singularly devoid of the melancholy pleasures and transfigurations that we characterize as the blues, in the widest sense of their many manifestations. It seems uniformly harsh. This piece has a quality of the moment after God blinked for the last time. Unlike so much of Handke, this piece does not elicit my affection for its author. I warmed to its artistry, but that is about it.  But perhaps I am the wrong reader, being so overly familiar with Handke/s work, suffering from an excess of deja vues.
Michael Roloff, Winter 2004, Seattle, WA.

(c) Michael Roloff, Winter 2004, Seattle, WA.

La Cuisine

Lyceum,

Copyright 2002 Times Newspapers Limited
The Times (London)

August 30, 2002, Friday

La Cuisine

Benedict Nightingale


What had been looking like the worst Edinburgh Festival ever for theatre, belatedly remembered itself on Wednesday. La Cuisine is almost wordless. Moreover, some of the words we hear don't make obvious sense. Yet Peter Handke and Mladen Materic's play for Toulouse's Theatre Tattoo is a rueful, funny, touching meditation on one room everyone bar the rich, spoilt and aristocratic knows well: the kitchen.

=Pourquoi la cuisine?= ask the excellent 11-person cast and, by way of answering their question, dash in and out dressed as different people and doing different things. The kitchen, it seems, is the place where people eat, relate, quarrel, do aerobics, betray each other, drink cups of coffee with their toes, despair.

In the snatches of monologue that interrupt the flow, one character claims to have been born in a kitchen, another conceived on its floor, another to have gone mad there. It looks ordinary -plain table, chairs, stove, tacky cupboards, old fridge -but it's the seething heart of the house.

Here's an answer to the objection that some of the mini-scenes could have happened anywhere. The sinister gunmen who appear at a couple's door, interview the husband then shoot him dead, might have committed the murder in a living-room, yard or barn. Yet Handke and Materic leave you feeling something pristine and profound has been sullied, partly because the dirty deed occurred in a place primarily associated with nourishment, growth, continuity: the bread of life.

In any case, most of the evening is entirely accessible. Two wives are enraged by the refusal of their husbands, one a cop, one a robber, to pay as much attention to a carefully prepared meal as to the work they've brought home. Last night there was a chuckle of recognition, too, for the hostess who stalks into the kitchen from the dinner party she's throwing next door, sits, boozes, effectively goes on strike, then puts on a glazed smile and returns to her guests. The study is the place for the super-ego: cooking and kitchens bring out the super-id.

Not everything works. Some of the more delirious lines -=you had, child, a face between hedgehog and exterminating angel= -left me wondering if Handke or Materic had made themselves ill gorging bad prawns in their own kitchens. But when an old couple react to the letter that says their son is dead, or a fickle wife hides another kind of missive from her husband, or a cancer victim warily lets himself be comforted by his family, or the characters simply talk of their most intimate feelings and failures, Materic's production defies convention by coming unmistakably to life.



Copyright 2002 Telegraph Group Limited
THE DAILY TELEGRAPH(LONDON)

August 30, 2002, Friday

HEADLINE: Nothing nouvelle about this cuisine

 BY CHARLES SPENCER

Edinburgh theatre

La Cuisine

ROYAL LYCEUM THEATRE

THE party is over on the Fringe, but the Edinburgh Festival's official drama programme grinds on, intent on boring the last few stragglers to death. There is something almost heroic about festival director Brian McMaster's knack of picking dud shows. He remains perpetually in thrall to avant-garde ideas that have long since grown stale, touchingly loyal to former enfants terribles who are now drawing their pensions and suffering the artistic equivalent of rheumatoid arthritis.

Take La Cuisine - and I wish someone would. What was it about this dreary parade of duff dance, dull mime and pretentious fragments of prose that made him think, =Wow! I've got to have this for my festival=? Doesn't he realise that Theatre de Complicite were doing this kind of thing far better in the Eighties and have since moved on to deeper work? Or that Matthew Bourne is currently presenting a play without words at the National Theatre, which for wit, style and sheer sexiness, makes La Cuisine seem like the work of posturing, incompetent adolescents?

The production is a joint venture between that arch bore of German experimentalism, Peter Handke - preposterously described in the programme as the most important post-modern writer since Becket (sic) - and Mladen Materic, a Yugoslav director whose Theatre Tattoo is now based in Toulouse. The 90-minute piece all takes place in an old-fashioned kitchen. =Pourquoi la cuisine?= a recorded voice-over repeatedly asks at the start, a question the viewer is likely to find himself echoing as the action unfolds, along with, =What the hell am I doing here when I could be doing something more interesting like giving the grill pan a good scrub at home?=

Eleven performers, from the old to the youthful, present fragmentary scenes. We watch them having a snatched breakfast before rushing off to work, having marital rows, preparing for a big wedding party, or sorrowfully sending a son off to war. Music, ranging from classical to heavy metal via Nancy Sinatra's These Boots are Made for Walking, accompanies these actions, and occasionally the performers indulge in dance, acrobatics and plate-spinning. The highlight of the show is watching a lissom young woman drinking a mug of coffee with her feet, but I'm not sure it's enough to justify the price of admission.

Materic is responsible for the visuals. Handke is in charge of the verbals, sometimes delivered by the company (in French), sometimes pre-recorded, and frequently projected on to the walls of the set. We hear about =the breath of a freshly chopped onion=, learn that =cat shit still smells of cat shit= and are vouchsafed the priceless information that =when you peel potatoes, it makes almost the same sound as when you comb a child's hair=. I can only conclude that Handke has either never peeled a potato or that his child has very peculiar hair.

La Cuisine could have worked as the theatrical equivalent of genre painting, or evocative photographs from the past, a celebration of the mundane and the persistence of the basic rituals of life through the horrors of war, the passing of the years, and routine human sorrows. But this highly stylised production is far too self-regarding, tricksy and up itself to achieve anything so simple, or so profound. As he has demonstrated so often, McMaster seems fatally incapable of distinguishing the meretricious from the meritorious.

Copyright 2002 The Financial Times Limited
Financial Times (London)

August 30, 2002, Friday London Edition 1



French meal is a dog's dinner EDINBURGH FESTIVAL LA CUISINE:

By ALASTAIR MACAULAY

When the recording angel holds out before Brian McMaster the long list of his Edinburgh International Festival's worst crimes, it will be seen that La Cuisine is scarcely even a fin, even by those of us who are ready to testify against him. But that's not how it feels while you're stuck in the theatre with it.

La Cuisine, by Maden Materic and Peter Handke and brought to Edinburgh by Toulouse's Theatre Tattoo (Materic directs), feels like pretentious, absurdist, pointless, Eurotwaddle. Which it is. Within the first minute, you know just what kind of show it's going to be. Characters who have no relation to each other start by dancing unconnected solos, and then ask us in French, =But why a kitchen?= It is no consolation to reflect that there are considerably worst forms of Edinburgh Festival torture elsewhere. Not even the fact that La Cuisine lasts only 90 minutes helps. Each second passes like an Ice Age.

Part of what makes La Cuisine so congealing an experience is that you can't give a damn about these characters. Materic and Handke certainly don't.

Characters come and go through this surreal kitchen, first singly, later in families, and the only thing that connects them is the fact that they're part of Materic's and Handke's kitchenware. Large sections of La Cuisine are in wordless dumbshow. And so we watched Odd Couple A sit down to a casserole (he wears a gun, reads papers, and expects her to serve his food to him without looking at her) while Nancy Sinatra's =These boots are made for walking= plays; then Odd Couple B; next, Odd Family C . . . And so what? So what, even when civil war, with machine gunfire, bursts out, first off-stage, then on?

Here, it looks like just another mere theatrical effect.

To Materic, who is from the former Yugoslavia, where his Theatre Tattoo began life in 1986, these elements may seem real enough. To us, however, Materic's people look unloved, observed, tepid.

Even the old couple who greet a son who returns from the wars and who later react to the news of his death are completely unengaging, cool, externalised. Only in one episode - a young bride who funds herself accepting flowers from a former suitor and is caught kissing him by her new husband - did I begin to care what would happen next, though there Handke interrupted the story before it reached any conclusion.

Sometimes Handke's nutty humour surfaces. One scene of exaggerated nostalgia begins with a man recalling how, when he was young, rooms were warmer and mothers more motherly - only to be capped by a younger man recalling how, when he was young, war was still war, and =pommes de terre= still came from =la terre=. Yet the fun seems as contrived as the crises had been. In truth, La Cuisine is harmless enough. It's even well-intentioned. But it's a waste of time; and it makes us feel that time is wasting us.

Alastair Macaulay Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh. Tel 0131 473 2000. www.eif.co.uk

LOAD-DATE: August 30, 2002


Edinburgh

Tom Service

Friday August 30, 2002

The Guardian

Directed by Mladen Materic, and with a rich, fragmentary text (in French) by Peter Handke, La Cuisine investigates what the kitchen represents in our lives. From this apparently banal starting point, the show develops an elegant series of scenes. Many are silent, save for period-setting music. They range from images of daily routine, like making coffee or preparing meals, to more dramatic moments: soldiers returning home from war, or an elaborate dinner party. If the action suggests various historical periods, time also collapses in Handke+s text. A bickering couple relate their problems as a three-millennia-old story, with its beginnings on the Silk Road and in the kitchen- hut of a tribe of nomads.

But there is no sense of dislocation in these theatrical anachronisms. They are united by the kitchen itself. The set becomes the main character, the only constant throughout the whole 90-minute show. There are other connections. There is a loose chronology, based on the time of day. The show begins with the rituals of the morning, and ends with characters preparing for bed. And time is telescoped into the present day just before the end of the play. A man, accompanied by a robotic dog, implores everyone to +flee the time of the kitchen+. It is a comment on the loss of values of domesticity and social interaction, represented by the kitchen, in modern society.

There are some dazzling coups de thetre in Materic+s direction. A man flies up behind the back of the stage; a couple+s argument is turned into a delicate, acrobatic dance. But what is more impressive is the way the show transfigures ordinary gestures. The simplicity of someone cooking food assumes an ambiguous dramatic meaning as well as an aesthetic beauty. Yet there are moments of surreal brilliance too. The final image is of enormous cherries descending into the set, suggesting that there is still magic in our lives - and our kitchens - if only we choose to look for it.


Profil, am 3. Juni 2002, Wolfgang Paterno

Peter Handke hat eine =U-Bahn-Geschichte= geschrieben, die bei den

Wiener Festwochen 2003 uraufgefuehrt werden soll.

Es handle sich um =ein kleines Stueck, achtzig bis neunzig Minuten lang wie ein Film, eher etwas Lustiges und die Fortsetzung von allem:
von -Kaspar-, -Publikumsbeschimpfung-, -Die Stunde, da wir nichts von einander wussten-=, so Handke im News.


Handkes =Cuisine=. Leicht moeglich, dass es am Ende noch Bondy in

Kooperation mit einer Wiener Spitzenbuehne wird. Der hat sich vor einigen Jahren nach kurzfristigen Differenzen mit dem alten Freund versoehnt und holt schon zu den aktuellen Festwochen ein kleines, aber feines Handke-Projekt: =La Cuisine - Die Kueche= ist eine Koproduktion der Wiener Festwochen mit franzoesischen Buehnen.

Mit dem Serben Mladen Materic entwickelte Handke einen witzigen
Bilderbogen ueber die Kuechengeschichte Europas im 20. Jahrhundert. Die grosse, altmodische Kueche mit Kohleofen, gusseisernem Herd und

mechanischer Kaffeemuehle ist das Herz des Lebens und wird zum Ort

eines fast wortlosen Schauspiels der Taenzer und Traeumer.

Inder naechsten Saison tritt Handke an der =Burg= als UEbersetzer von

Sophokles =OEdipus auf Kolonnos= in der sensationellen Konstellation

Klaus-Michael Grueber / Bruno Ganz an. Dann folgt auch schon die

Urauffuehrung, und das ist es wohl, was man Heimkehr nennt.

La Cuisine - die Kueche. Festwochen-Gastspiel am 30./31. Mai im Wiener

Odeon.

NEWS, am 2. Mai 2002, Heinz Sichrovsky

Symphonie einer Grosskueche

Die Festwochen zeigen =La Cuisine= von Mladen Materic und Peter Handke

Wien - Vor Jahren schrieb Peter Handke ein Theaterstueck, dessen Dialoge auf
der Buehne stumm blieben - stumm, was die Sprache der Stimmen betraf. Deren
Part uebernahmen die Koerper, denen Handke seinen Text gewidmet hatte. Die
Stunde, da wir nichts voneinander wussten hiess das Stueck und war eine
poetische Reflexion auf die Fluechtigkeit von Alltagsbegegnungen auf einem
oeffentlichen Platz.
Was der Platz fuer die Stadt, ist die Kueche fuer die kleinere Gemeinschaft der
Familien, der Paare, WGs . . ., Ort des Morgenkaffees, der grossen Gespraeche,
der spaeten Wanderungen mit nackten Sohlen zum Kuehlschrank. Mit La Cuisine,
einer Produktion des heute in Toulouse beheimateten, urspruenglich in
Sarajewo gegruendeten Theatre Tattoo unter Regisseur Mladen Materic, luden
die Wiener Festwochen erneut einen Abend ein, dessen Geschichten die Koerper
der wunderbaren elf Schauspieler des Ensembles erzaehlen. - Und die Musik,
das Licht und seine Stimmungen von fruehester Morgendaemmerung bis zu
naechtlicher Dunkelheit, die Requisiten, die, wie Stafetten, von Figur zu
Figur weitergereicht, die Szenen lose aneinanderbinden.
Basierend auf einer assoziativen Textsammlung Peter Handkes rund um die
Kueche und auf eigenen Erinnerungen schuf das Ensemble eine leichte, in der
Praezision der Beobachtung bewundernswert genaue Szenenfolge, deren
Chronologie die Stunden eines Tages bestimmen. Das morgendliche Einheizen
frueherer Tage, Szenen eines Fruehstuecks, unterschieden nach Temperament und
Lebensalter der Kuechenbewohner. Jeder von Materics elf aussergewoehnlichen
Darstellern versteht es, mit wenigen Bewegungen die Spuren eines Lebens zu
skizzieren, in Koerperhaltung, Gestik, Tempo. Bisweilen abstrahiert in
Momenten des Tanzes, die sich schwerelos in das von feiner Nostalgie
getragene, wundersam stimmige Ganze fuegen.

Der Standard, am 1./2. Juni 2002,

 Cornelia Niedermeier

> derstandard.at

Mladen Materic, Peter Handke : la Cuisine a quatre mains Les deux createurs partagent le gout des choses quotidiennes, et ont choisi comme sujet la piece de la maison paraissant la plus ordinaire. Pourtant, tous les evenements de la vie sy deroulent, joyeux ou dramatiques Il va se produire a Toulouse, un evenement culturel dimportance qui risque de passer inaperu aux yeux de nombre de Toulousains. Importante, la creation du spectacle La Cuisine lest par la personnalite de ses auteurs. Mladen Materic, originaire de Sarajevo o il appartenait a la meme mouvance culturelle quEmir Kusturica, est installe a Toulouse, au Theatre Garonne, depuis la guerre en ex-Yougoslavie. Il est le seul homme de theatre de Midi-Pyrenees dont les spectacles sont regulierement invites aux quatre coins de lEurope. Jusque la, il en concevait seul lecriture. Pour la premiere fois, il collabore avec un ecrivain, en fait un auteur majeur de la litterature contemporaine allemande. Peter Handke a ecrit quelques pieces de theatre, de nombreux romans et realise un film, La Femme Gauchere, dapres lun dentre eux. Depuis longtemps les deux hommes evoquaient lidee dune collaboration. Pour le Bosniaque, il sagit dune etape importante puisque, avant celui-ci, ses spectacles se racontaient dans le silence, au-dela de lunivers des mots, par les corps des comediens, les couleurs, une perception decomposee du temps, de tres simples elements de decor. Dans La Cuisine, les personnages parlent, meme si lAllemand na pas elabore un texte theatral stricto sensu mais, de la meme faon que le metteur en scene ne raconte jamais un recit lineaire, des fragments decriture, chansons, litanies, poemes, dialogues, recits. Mlateric explique leur gout commun pour les choses quotidiennes : Les themes de mes spectacles comme ceux de ses livres sinscrivent dans les gestes simples de la vie, pas dans les evenements historiques ou sociaux. Les deux createurs le prouvent avec leur choix de prendre comme sujet la piece de la maison la plus ordinaire et banale. Ordinaire et banale, pas si sur. Cest Mladen Materic qui a convie Peter Handke dans sa Cuisine, un theme quil a lui-meme imagine, ce qui ne surprendra pas les spectateurs de ses precedents spectacles o les decors, tres usuels, voire stereotypes, sont references a de tres ordinaires pieces dhabitation : la monotonie des jours y est tres vite troublee par lirruption de reves ou de visions cauchemardesques. Materic trouve la matiere a developper le paradoxe : Nous entretenons une vision contradictoire avec la cuisine. Les actes quon y accomplit sont fondamentaux. On peut aller au theatre ou non, lire ou non, ecouter de la musique ou non, mais il est impossible de vivre sans manger ou boire. Dans le meme temps, cest un espace dont on ne cesse de vouloir saffranchir. On desire se liberer de tas de choses quon y fait, la vaisselle par exemple. Les progres technologiques, la sophistication croissante des appareils menagers et de la domotique nous eloignent de cette realite, comme les images electroniques nous eloignent de celles de la vie. Cest cette contradiction, cet entre-deux qui minteresse. Handke a eu plutt tendance a mettre la lumiere sur cette liberation ou cette fuite. Moi, je lai ramenee dans ma cuisine. Dans sa cuisine et sa mythologie : les decors anodins de son monde sont traverses des evenements de la vie, fetes, enterrements, ou font echo aux tragedies humaines. La guerre nest jamais loin. Cest forcement vrai pour cet ultime lieu de sociabilite : Dans la cuisine se vivent les moments importants de notre vie, joyeux ou dramatiques. Elle est le centre des decisions majeures, les parents et les enfants sy engueulent, les couples sy font et defont. Les situations sont abordees de maniere fragmentee, a travers differentes epoques, differentes familles, differents personnages. Un oeuf qui tombe du frigo, un robinet qui ne ferme pas, une ampoule qui grille, autant de situations extremement banales qui peuvent rapprocher les gens, y compris a travers des epoques tres differentes. On saperoit que, derriere les progres et les evolutions culturelles, il y a un fond commun, une maniere de rituel qui rapprochent les hommes plus surement que les idees de nation, de religion ou les pensees ideologiques les plus ambitieuses. Cest une notion que nous avons profondement en commun, Handke et moi. Comme dans ses precedents spectacles, la dimension plastique des decors prend une place essentielle. Mladen Materic est un peintre et plasticien reconnu. Il a dailleurs conu la prefiguration de cette Cuisine en excellente compagnie, invite lannee derniere a Milan a une exposition collective o chaque plasticien devait realiser la piece dune maison. Les autres artistes avaient nom Peter Greenaway, Yoko Ono, Bob Wilson, Pistoletto, Emir Kusturica... Lexposition fut prolongee dun mois en raison de son succes. Elle devrait se refaire en Espagne a loccasion de la Biennale de Valence. Christian Bonrepaux Du 17 au 28 avril, mardi, vendredi et samedi a 21 h, mercredi et jeudi a 19 h 30. Relache dimanche et lundi. Theatre Garonne, 1, avenue du Chateau-dEau. 05 62 48 56 56. -

La Cuisine Ein Projekt von Peter Handke und Mladen Materic Gastspiel Theatre Tattoo in Zusammenarbeit mit Theatre Garonne, Toulouse und mit Art Bureau Muenchen Auffuehrungen im Kleinen Theater im Ruhrfestspielhaus 21. Juni, 20.00 Uhr Premiere Weitere Vorstellungen 22. Juni, 20.00 Uhr; 23. Juni, 19.00 Uhr und am 24. Juni, 18.00 Uhr Finden Sie, die Kueche ist ein ungewoehnliches Thema fuer einen Theaterabend? Befuerchten Sie vielleicht, dass Sie den ganzen Abend zusehen muessen, wie andere essen? Haben Sie schon darueber nachgedacht, was sonst noch alles in einer Kueche passiert? Abgesehen davon, dass hier gekocht und gegessen wird, wird in Kuechen gestritten, geliebt, gezeugt, gelacht, verletzt, verbrannt, gewuetet, geschrieen, gehasst, gelitten, geredet, geweint und noch vieles mehr. Es kann also spannend werden. In der Kueche vereinen sich die Elemente, hier trifft Feuer auf Wasser, Pflanze auf Tier, hier spielt sich das Leben ab. Die Kueche ist Hort der Nahrung und des Abfalls, der Einsamkeit einer Fertigmahlzeit und des taeglichen Familienrituals. Hier scheiden sich die Geister und Generationen, und hier geht die Liebe durch den Magen. Es gibt die Kueche der Reichen und die der Armen; der Unterschied ist nicht immer offensichtlich. Es gibt die Kueche des 18. Jahrhunderts, die Kueche mit oder ohne Elektrizitaet, mit oder ohne fliessendem Wasser, die in Toulouse oder Moskau, die der Antike mit Goettern im haeuslichen Herd und die, die von ihrer Herrschaft nie betreten und zum Reich der Bediensteten wurde. Es gibt Kuechenlieder und Kuechengedichte, Kuechengemaelde und Kuechenfilme, und dies ist eben ein Kuechendrama. Mladen Materic, Gruender der Gruppe Theatre Tattoo, hat sich zusammen mit seinem Ensemble diesen Wohnraum, der soviel mehr ist als ein blosses Zimmer, zum Ausgangspunkt eines seiner ganz besonderen Projekte erkoren. Die serbisch-franzoesische Gruppe wurde Anfang der 80er Jahre in Sarajevo ins Leben gerufen und hat seitdem durch aussergewoehnliche Produktionen Aufsehen erregt. Mit ihrer Suche nach einer neuartigen Theatersprache hat sich das Theatre Tattoo immer wieder um den Kern einer grundlegenden Erkenntnis bewegt: Dass sich die menschlichen Beziehungen in Wahrheit jenseits der Worte und ihrer Bedeutungen abspielen. Fast ohne Sprache gehen sie tief auf die Ablaeufe und Emotionen des Zusammenlebens ein und zeigen so die Tragik und Komik der Zustaende menschlicher Existenz. Auch Die Kueche ist Theater fast ohne Worte. Ihre Projekte wurden zunaechst im ehemaligen Jugoslawien, dann auch international von Kritik und Publikum enthusiastisch aufgenommen. Mit Auftritten bei grossen europaeischen Festivals machte sich die Gruppe in der Theaterwelt einen Namen. 1992 kam das gesamte Ensemble von Sarajevo nach Toulouse. Cooperationen mit renommierten franzoesischen Theatern folgten. Dass die serbische Gruppe ihr neuestes Projekt zusammen mit dem Autor Peter Handke entwickelt, liegt nahe. In juengster Zeit provozierte Handkes Engagement fuer Serbien, das auch in seinem Stueck Die Fahrt im Einbaum oder Das Stueck zum Film im Krieg (1999) deutlich wurde, im deutschsprachigen Raum kontroverse Reaktionen. Bekannt wurde Handke als Theaterautor mit seiner fruehen dramatischen Produktion (Kaspar, Publikumsbeschimpfung), in der es um die Verneinung aller theatralischen Konventionen geht; in seinen spaeteren Dramen schuf er mit-tels hochstilisierter Sprache eine an imposanten Bildern reiche, zeitlose Buehnenwelt.,


di LORENZO TOZZI

PONTEDERA - C e del nuovo quest anno a Pontedera. Dopo Spoleto, Chambery, Palermo e Marsiglia toccher a infatti quest anno alla cittadina toscana il compito di ospitare la quinta edizione delle Giornate professionali italo-francesi che dal teatro e danza si allargheranno anche al teatro di strada ed al circo, alla musica ed al cinema.
Nata nel 1997 dall intento di intensificare scambi in tutti i campi della cultura, rilanciare i rapporti bilaterali grazie alla collaborazione dei rispettivi Ministeri della cultura e delle relative Ambasciate, l iniziativa, ormai divenuta uno storico appuntamento annuale, consente in un clima di grande entusiasmo un incontro tra gli esperti e gli operatori dei diversi settori, divenendo una sorta di vivo laboratorio di idee e progetti. Le giornate, che si svolgeranno dal 6 al 9 giugno, nascono con la stretta collaborazione, per la parte italiana, dell ETI e del Festival Roma-Europa. Non una mostra mercato, dunque, una semplice vetrina del nuovo in fatto di produzione teatrale, ma piuttosto una stimolante occasione di approfondimento.
Per l Italia aprir a la rassegna il Laboratorio di Pontedera di Roberto Bacci con Ci che resta ispirato alla Montagna incantata di Thomas Mann. Un esempio di interscambio tra discipline e linguaggi diversi e offerto anche da Musik da Franz Wedekind nell allestimento dell Egumteatro e da Orpheus Glance de i Motus, giovane formazione di successo. Marco Martinelli presenter a invece L isola di Alcina , prima tappa di un trittico sull Orlando furioso ariostesco su testo del poeta romagnolo Nevio Spadoni.
Interessante nell ambito teatro la proposta francese con La Cuisine di Mladen Materic e Peter Handke e Il faut faire plaisir aux clients ispirato a Rabelais per la regia di Marie Vayssi ere.
Il cantiere danza vive dei contributi di giovani coreografi trasversali come l emergente Ornella D Agostino e i tradizionali Roberto Castello e Raffaella Giordano.
Avvincente la linea artistica dei Cantieri teatro con il progetto per Nihil , nulla ovvero La macchina di Amleto di Armando Punzo, forte di esperienze teatrali non convenzionali nel carcere di Volterra, il progetto in ambito circense di Davide Iodice su i Giganti della montagna di Pirandello, i seminari di Roberto De Lellis sul rapporto musica-danza, l atelier sull attore di Eric Lascade, quello di Giorgio Barberio Corsetti sulla componente fisica del linguaggio teatrale (titolo Metamorfosi - Corpi in trasformazione ).
In margine sar a presentato anche il sito Italia-Francia nell ambito ETI e l edizione francese de Le Vie dei Festival, pubblicazione che raccoglie i dati di tutti i festival estivi italiani.

Mladen Materic, Peter Handke :la Cuisine a quatre mains Les deux createurs partagent le gout des choses quotidiennes, et ont choisi comme sujet la piece de la maison paraissant la plus ordinaire. Pourtant, tous les evenements de la vie sy deroulent, joyeux ou dramatiquesIl va se produire a Toulouse, un evenement culturel dimportance qui risque de passer inaperu aux yeux de nombre de Toulousains. Importante, la creation du spectacle La Cuisine lest par la personnalite de ses auteurs. Mladen Materic, originaire de Sarajevo o il appartenait a la meme mouvance culturelle quEmir Kusturica, est installe a Toulouse, au Theatre Garonne, depuis la guerre en ex-Yougoslavie. Il est le seul homme de theatre de Midi-Pyrenees dont les spectacles sont regulierement invites aux quatre coins de lEurope. Jusque la, il en concevait seul lecriture. Pour la premiere fois, il collabore avec un ecrivain, en fait un auteur majeur de la litterature contemporaine allemande. Peter Handke a ecrit quelques pieces de theatre, de nombreux romans et realise un film, La Femme Gauchere, dapres lun dentre eux. Depuis longtemps les deux hommes evoquaient lidee dune collaboration. Pour le Bosniaque, il sagit dune etape importante puisque, avant celui-ci, ses spectacles se racontaient dans le silence, au-dela de lunivers des mots, par les corps des comediens, les couleurs, une perception decomposee du temps, de tres simples elements de decor. Dans La Cuisine, les personnages parlent, meme si lAllemand na pas elabore un texte theatral stricto sensu mais, de la meme faon que le metteur en scene ne raconte jamais un recit lineaire, des fragments decriture, chansons, litanies, poemes, dialogues, recits. Mlateric explique leur gout commun pour les choses quotidiennes : Les themes de mes spectacles comme ceux de ses livres sinscrivent dans les gestes simples de la vie, pas dans les evenements historiques ou sociaux. Les deux createurs le prouvent avec leur choix de prendre comme sujet la piece de la maison la plus ordinaire et banale. Ordinaire et banale, pas si sur. Cest Mladen Materic qui a convie Peter Handke dans sa Cuisine, un theme quil a lui-meme imagine, ce qui ne surprendra pas les spectateurs de ses precedents spectacles o les decors, tres usuels, voire stereotypes, sont references a de tres ordinaires pieces dhabitation : la monotonie des jours y est tres vite troublee par lirruption de reves ou de visions cauchemardesques. Materic trouve la matiere a developper le paradoxe : Nous entretenons une vision contradictoire avec la cuisine. Les actes quon y accomplit sont fondamentaux. On peut aller au theatre ou non, lire ou non, ecouter de la musique ou non, mais il est impossible de vivre sans manger ou boire. Dans le meme temps, cest un espace dont on ne cesse de vouloir saffranchir. On desire se liberer de tas de choses quon y fait, la vaisselle par exemple. Les progres technologiques, la sophistication croissante des appareils menagers et de la domotique nous eloignent de cette realite, comme les images electroniques nous eloignent de celles de la vie. Cest cette contradiction, cet entre-deux qui minteresse. Handke a eu plutot tendance a mettre la lumiere sur cette liberation ou cette fuite. Moi, je lai ramenee dans ma cuisine. Dans sa cuisine et sa mythologie : les decors anodins de son monde sont traverses des evenements de la vie, fetes, enterrements, ou font echo aux tragedies humaines. La guerre nest jamais loin. Cest forcement vrai pour cet ultime lieu de sociabilite : Dans la cuisine se vivent les moments importants de notre vie, joyeux ou dramatiques. Elle est le centre des decisions majeures, les parents et les enfants sy engueulent, les couples sy font et defont. Les situations sont abordees de maniere fragmentee, a travers differentes epoques, differentes familles, differents personnages. Un oeuf qui tombe du frigo, un robinet qui ne ferme pas, une ampoule qui grille, autant de situations extremement banales qui peuvent rapprocher les gens, y compris a travers des epoques tres differentes. On saperoit que, derriere les progres et les evolutions culturelles, il y a un fond commun, une maniere de rituel qui rapprochent les hommes plus surement que les idees de nation, de religion ou les pensees ideologiques les plus ambitieuses. Cest une notion que nous avons profondement en commun, Handke et moi. Comme dans ses precedents spectacles, la dimension plastique des decors prend une place essentielle. Mladen Materic est un peintre et plasticien reconnu. Il a dailleurs conu la prefiguration de cette Cuisine en excellente compagnie, invite lannee derniere a Milan a une exposition collective oE chaque plasticien devait realiser la piece dune maison. Les autres artistes avaient nom Peter Greenaway, Yoko Ono, Bob Wilson, Pistoletto, Emir Kusturica... Lexposition fut prolongee dun mois en raison de son succes. Elle devrait se refaire en Espagne a loccasion de la Biennale de Valence. Christian Bonrepaux Du 17 au 28 avril, mardi, vendredi et samedi a 21 h, mercredi et jeudi a 19 h 30.Relache dimanche et lundi. Theatre Garonne, 1, avenue du Chateau-dEau. 05 62 48 56 56.

Kultur
Der Auftritt des nackten Textes
Bruno Ganz las Handke: Kein Abend fuer Konsumierende, aber einer fuer Lesende.
Von Christine Loetscher
Sie kuemmern sich nicht darum, was Mode ist, im Gegenteil: Das haben der Schriftsteller Peter Handke und der Schauspieler Bruno Ganz gemeinsam. Wenn der eine den anderen liest, wie das an den letzten beiden Abenden im Theater Neumarkt der Fall war, kommt dabei nicht unbedingt das heraus, was man heute von einer Lesung erwartet. Bruno Ganz, als Star und Iffland-Ring-Traeger nach Zuerich zurueckgekehrt, denkt nicht einmal daran, eine Show fuer TV-gewohnte Konsumentinnen und Konsumenten auf die Buehne zu bringen. Recht hat er. Denn das, was er mit Handkes Saetzen anstellt, kann nur in einem Raum atmen, der ganz frei von Alltagsgerede, Nettigkeiten und leeren Floskeln ist.
Tisch und Stuhl
Das bedeutet also: Keine Einfuehrung, keine Erklaerung. Kein Wort ueber Handke, wie man ihn heute kennt, als Gerechtigkeitskaempfer fuer Serbien. Es ging nicht um Handke als Person, vielleicht nicht einmal um Handke als Schriftsteller. Aber es ging um den Text Langsame Heimkehr, der dieses Jahr zwanzig Jahre alt wird. Nur das Buch und der Leser, der Tisch und der Stuhl. Der Fotograf musste verschwinden, bevor die Lesung begonnen hatte, und selbst die Wasserflasche musste mit einem Platz unter dem Tisch vorlieb nehmen. Ach ja, und das Publikum gehoerte auch dazu, zum Dreieck von Text, Stimme und Ohr. Offenbar, der Protest einer Zwischenruferin zeigte es, waren nicht alle bereit, eine Fuenfviertelstunde lang die noetige Konzentration aufzubringen. Handke und Ganz, Ganz und Handke verlangten diese aber, unbedingt.
Wer aber die Szene in Theo Angelopoulos' Film Die Ewigkeit und ein Tag liebt, in der Bruno Ganz als todkranker Alexandros eine ganze Nacht lang in seinem Wagen vor der Ampel steht, wer von seinem Gesicht inmitten der wechselnden Farben nie genug bekommen kann, der war in der Lesung am rechten Ort. Denn Bruno Ganz zeigte eine weitere Facette seiner grossen Kunst, mit einem Minimum an Bewegung ein Maximum an Ausdruck zu erreichen, diesmal in der Rolle des Lesers, der ganz im Dienst des Textes steht. Das bedeutet, ganz Sprache zu werden.
Text und Stimme
Wenn der Schauspieler das Wort Ordnung oder Form oder Evangelium aussprach, loeste sich der Alltagssinn auf, und die Vokale und Konsonanten setzten sich neu zusammen, gewannen eine neue Plastizitaet. Das Faszinierende war nicht nur, dass es Bruno Ganz gelang, die spezifische Handke-Bedeutung der Woerter in Laute zu uebersetzen, sondern dass er, darueber hinaus, auch dem Gestus des Textes eine Stimme gab. Keine wirklich schoene Stimme war es, die da erklang, nichts, was man als Musik bezeichnen koennte. Es war eben die Stimme von Handkes Naturforscher Valentin Sorger, dem die Angst im Nacken sitzt, von der Sprache verlassen zu werden, jede Tonfaehigkeit zu verlieren. Deshalb beschaeftigt sich Sorger auf seiner langsamen Heimkehr von Alaska nach Europa damit, alles, was er sieht, nachzuzeichnen, damit er das Glueck in den - wenn auch gefaelschten - Bildern findet. Gegenueber den Offenbarungserlebnissen Sorgers in der Metropole New York blitzte bei Bruno Ganz immer wieder ein ironisches Flackern in den Augen auf. Handkes metaphysische Suche gewann durch den Humor, den der Leser da und dort darin entdeckte, tatsaechlich eine neue Dimension. So etwas kann nur gelingen, wenn man einen Text ganz nackt auftreten laesst.
Theater Neumarkt., 2. und 3. Maerz, 20 Uhr
BILD THOMAS BURLA
Ganz allein mit Handkes Text: Metaphysische Suche und ironisches Flackern.


The surprise for anyone who saw Peter Handke's play The hour we knew nothing of each other at the 1994 Edinburgh Festival is that his latest work La Cuisine contains words. Not many, but enough to occasionally involve the use of two simultaneous sets of surtitles and to add a piquancy to his more familiar wordless diorama of human activity and interaction. Co-written with Mladen Materic, La Cuisine is a highly choreographed event, however, and in this production by the excellent Theatre Tattoo from Toulouse, Materic and Handke's sequence of elliptical social and emotional snapshots unfold into an uninterrupted, mimed pageant of life on a kind of timeless, nationless stage. Viewed from the perspective that the kitchen is the space in which the home's heart beats and neatly overlooking the fact that more accidents happen here than in the bathroom, incidentally this big, old-fashioned room, decidedly non-MFI with its cast iron stove, free-standing dresser, mechanical coffee-grinder and central table, is a hectic place to be.

Characters from different social backgrounds, of various ages, each with their own baggage, flit in and out of this generic kitchen sometimes using doors, sometimes hoisted offstage, sometimes slid off surreptitiously on a kind of escalator. Young and old go through their personal rituals of attempting breakfast, preparing meals, loving, laughing, weeping and arguing. Whiffs of freshly ground coffee and warm cinnamon tantalise the nostrils, a gigantic baguette hangs from the ceiling. It's the place to retreat to, to seek comfort and nurture in. But also, alarmingly, it's the cosy cocoon from which you leave for school, or don't return to from war, or from where you can be taken out and shockingly shot in cold blood.

Running all these threads together in one gathering-point the performers actor-dancers with a gymnast thrown in rely on gestures, glances and gesticulations to convey the rhythm and poetry of Handke's sometimes surreal, sometimes deliciously trivial scenarios. Memories of sex, birth and death simmer gently, seasoned with faded recollections of taking home school reports, bringing in the shopping, coping with the angst of family gatherings or celebrating the changing seasons.

In this ever-changing loop of kitchen lifecycles the 11 characters create a melancholy, magical and sometimes maddening kaleidoscope of human behaviour. Silent, spatial encounters and amusing near-misses crescendo into an operatic burst of poignancy when word of bereavement is brought to an elderly couple. They have no present for the young bearer of their bad news except the scarf from round his old neck and a couple of ripe apples from her table. The landscape is surprisingly broad but it needs to be to accommodate all the quirks and profundities of human behaviour that Materic, as director and set designer, has highlighted in Handke's concentration of dramatic metaphor.

I said I, Barbican Theatre, London
Bored of the dance
By Nadine Meisner
08 September 2001


In the early Eighties, the ultra-talented Flemish choreographer Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker wowed us with her fiercely perfect, excitingly avant-garde pieces. In 1992, she succeeded Mark Morris at Brussels' national opera house and thereby became accepted into the mainstream. Yet she has always remained true to her radical, serious self.

In the 21-year string of works behind her (she is now 41) she has oscillated between a pure dance approach, closely tied to its music, and dance theatre mixing different media. Her latest piece to visit London, i said i (1999), belongs to the second category. It uses the dancers of her company Rosas to act out their own intense scenes and to speak text from Peter Handke's play Self-Accusation, as well as to dance, while two music ensembles one classical, the other contemporary  play in alternation. At two and half hours without an interval, the prospect seemed rather daunting and the Barbican kindly distributed water bottles to critics. Some of us, though, were less concerned about mild dehydration than the law that says what goes in must come out.

The lengthy quotes from Handke are also concerned with laws  the laws of becoming an individual, the laws of fitting into a group, the laws of an oppressive society. Sandwiched in between these recitations are scenes in which the performers rush about, assemble junk, remove their clothes, dance sequences that might start with one person and gain others. Taka Shamoto has a big humiliating tantrum in which she hurls insults (in Japanese) and erupts into the audience. Fumiyo Ikeda, a Rosas dancer from way back, performs a lengthy solo, the movement as fractured as the structure.

The minutes tick on slowly. Some people left. Others longed to follow them. When a man, victimised by the rest of the group on stage, indignantly asked +Which laws of the theatre did I violate?+, we all burst out laughing. No one in the audience actually hissed out an answer, but the law of avoiding boredom would have been top of my list.

I have always admired the low, lean outlines and rhythmic patterns of Keersmaeker's dance, but here this seemed desultory and throwaway. The passages of chaotic stage business were mostly irritating, Fabrizio Cassol's jazz saxophone screeched unpleasantly, although DJ Grazzhoppa's solo sound-spin on his turntables was fun. Perversely, for a choreographer, it is the spoken text that is the piece's most powerful and evocative component: repetitious phrases that build accumulatively like dance numbers, compellingly delivered by each speaking dancer.

When the final speech ended and the lights dimmed, when the Ictus ensemble began their long Brahms recital, you felt you had reached a beautiful, suspended quietude and despite all the purgatorial moments you had lived something worthwhile. i said i isn't a dud; it's just that you wouldn't want to do it too often.




Batsheva Dance Company

Gallaabning: Det israelske dansekompagni Batsheva Dance Company abner Arhus Festuge 2001.



Den internationale presse har forlngst overgivet sig, og det samme har det store publikum, der verden over har taget imod det israelske dansekompagni, Batsheva Dance Company, der abner Arhus Festuge 2001.

Nytnkende, storslaede, smukke og kraftfulde er nogle af de prdikater, pressen har fundet frem, nar de har skullet beskrive opstningerne af kompagniet, der, lige siden Ohad Naharin tradte til som gruppens kunstneriske leder og koreograf i 1990, har sat helt nye standarder for kvalitet og originalitet i danseverdenen. Det er i srlig grad i kraft af ham, at kompagniet nu rangerer blandt de bedste dansekompagnier i verden.

Kompagniet er sammensat af internationale  after og har spillet pa alle kontinenter og nsten alle store festivaler i verden med enorm succes. I Israel er Batsheva Dance Company afholdt af et stort og hengivent publikum, der spnder lige fra de helt unge, der betragter kompagniets forestillinger som kultbegivenheder, og til det mere modne publikum, der fokuserer pa andre ting, men i lige sa hoj grad har taget opstningerne til sig.

Det nye vrk +Virus of Ohad Naharin+ er baseret pa den ostrigske manuskriptforfatter Peter Handke+s =Offending the Audience=. Stykket, der blev opfort pa studenterscenerne over hele Europa i slutningen af 60+erne som en provokation, blev for nylig genopdaget af Ohad Naharin. Det er i mindre grad fornrmelsen af publikum, end det er opfordringen til efternksomhed og en eksakt beskrivelse af de krav, der stilles i dag til teater og dans, der giver stykket en ganske srlig aktualitet.

Musikken er af den unge israelske cellist og komponist, Karni Postel, og en arabisk musikgruppe fra Israel.

Abningen af Arhus Festuge overvres af Hendes Majestt Dronning Margrethe II og Hans Kongelige Hojhed Prinsen. Abningstalen holdes af Hendes Majestt Dronningen og velkomsttalen af borgmester Flemming Knudsen.

Musikhuset Aarhus danner rammen for Europapremieren, der fremfores af 16 professionelle dansere fra hele verden, hvoraf en oven i kobet oprindeligt kommer fra Arhus. Selvsamme danser, Jesper Thirup Hansen, der har vret danser i Batsheva Dance Company de seneste tre ar, star selv for opsningen under forestillingen.

Forestillingen vises i Danmark kun i Arhus og det er bl.a. takket ve den tidligere israelske ambassador i Danmark Yitzhak Eldan.

Det er muligt at se en lille video fra en af deres forestillinger pa Arhus Festuges hjemmeside, hvis man klikker pa det lille ikon med en filmrulle (Det forudsotter dog, at computeren har det rigtige software installeret).

Resume:

Gallaabning: Batsheva Dance Company
Virus of Ohad Naharin
Europapremiere
Sted: Musikhuset Aarhus, Store Sal
Tidspunkter: Fredag d. 31/8 kl. 19.30 og lordag d. 1/9 kl. 20.00
Arrangor: Arhus Festuge
Pris: Fredag: 240,- 215,- 195,- For grupper min. 10 pers.: Sporg efter rabatter.
(For medlemmer af DIF: Se den udsendte meddelelse