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Kindertotenlieder

Gisèle Vienne

A young man rises from the dead and returns at his own funeral. What happened? How did he die? One cold, wintry night, horrific memories resurface. The encounter and dialogue between his ghost and another adolescent takes the audience on an equally beautiful and bizarre trip. Onstage, the group KTL (formed to create this piece in 2007, consisting of Stephen F. O’Malley and Peter Rehberg) perform live music that mixes guitarist-composer Stephen O'Malley’s experimental interpretation of black metal with the electronic sounds of Peter Rehberg. On stage, the boundaries between good and evil, humans and animals, and life and death dissolve. With Kindertotenlieder, Vienne has created an uncanny dream reality full of references to wonderfully eerie fairy tales and traditions.

dates

Thu June 17 2021 8:30 PM

Thu June 17 2021 10:30 PM

Fri June 18 2021 8:30 PM

Fri June 18 2021 10:30 PM

information

  • Duration of performance unknown (zonder pauze)

Kindertotenlieder is a sensual experience of great violence. It is constructed by superimposing the expression of fantasies, fiction, reality, the unknown, and different temporalities, as different permeable strata of the experience of the real, and slips from buried memory to awareness. Revived tradition The staging of a teenager’s funeral and his return as a ghost in Kindertotenlieder bring together three types of rituals and the codes and aesthetics associated with them: a funeral, a black metal concert, and a pagan celebration linked to the march of the Perchten, an Austrian tradition in which grotesque monsters embody dread and anguish. They appear in early January to chase away evil demons and take the souls of the damned to punish them.

Kindertotenlieder is a sensual experience of great violence. It is constructed by superimposing the expression of fantasies, fiction, reality, the unknown, and different temporalities, as different permeable strata of the experience of the real, and slips from buried memory to awareness. Revived tradition The staging of a teenager’s funeral and his return as a ghost in Kindertotenlieder bring together three types of rituals and the codes and aesthetics associated with them: a funeral, a black metal concert, and a pagan celebration linked to the march of the Perchten, an Austrian tradition in which grotesque monsters embody dread and anguish. They appear in early January to chase away evil demons and take the souls of the damned to punish them.

Having Austrian family ties, Vienne has followed the recent evolution and significant return of this tradition with special interest. Since the early 1990s, groups of mostly young men have worked at reviving this once-popular Perchten tradition. Its close link to horror and fantasy films as well as the culture of heavy metal and black metal shows the importance of being able to move between a highly local culture and an international one. Thus, while being pagan and local, this tradition has different echoes in contemporary popular culture. Kindertotenlieder links this tradition, its aesthetics and codes with those of black metal, which is also influenced by various Scandinavian and Germanic pagan cultures and has a similar Romantic iconography associated with it. A black metal group is giving a concert for this teenager’s funeral; the teenagers in attendance are fans of the genre and bring its codes into play. Memory The dramatic work unfolds in a landscape under heavy snow. The setting makes it possible to stage different reconstructions of the events, and thus offers several hypotheses concerning the boy’s death, revealing different layers of memory. When speech is yet to emerge, emotions, movement and poetry do the speaking. This language of the body and poetry precedes the spoken word and leads to an understanding of what was buried in memory: that the dead teenager was raped and murdered by the living teenager, whom he sees again. The emergence of intelligible speech, which culture trains us to hear, requires, foremost, a sensitivity of mind. As the piece unfolds, memory returns and bodies and words come to the surface. The stage has always served as a place where the deceased could be summoned and reanimated. In their appearance and their gestures, the performers in Kindertotenlieder mingle with other characters in the form of artificial or retouched bodies, both animate and inanimate. Five dancers and actors, two musicians and ten life-sized dolls interpret these characters, alternately incarnate and disembodied, alive and dead, real and hallucinated. By superimposing the different temporalities that make up the experience of the present, through a score that combines choreographic, theatrical, musical, literary, and visual work, the different strata that make up our perception and experience of memory are formally deployed within the space of the stage. Liberation and representations Death is the ultimate example of something that on the one hand is already familiar but at the same time belongs to a different, unknown world. Traditional celebrations like the Austrian Perchten night, during which death is both feared and celebrated, temporarily lift such taboos. Kindertotenlieder invites us to experiment and question our reading of reality and fantasy through different registers of superimposed representations. It is about exploring the way we express our obsessions and fears, and our awareness of them, within what is represented and what is not. The representation of dread can be linked to that of death and its constant proximity to human characteristics such as body appearance and behavior. The representation of a form that is both familiar and foreign, and therefore disturbing, constitutes a unique resource for the experiences that are a part of the ceremonies, rites, and performances.

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credits

concept Gisèle Vienne text Dennis Cooper dramaturgy, direction Dennis Cooper music Stephen O’Malley, Peter Rehberg, KTL, Sun O))), Boris light design Patrick Riou conception robots Alexandre Vienne conception dolls Gisèle Vienne creation dolls Raphaël Rubbens, Dorothéa Vienne-Pollak, Gisèle Vienne, Manuel Majastre assistence Manuel Majastre creation wooden masks Max Kössler make-up Rebecca Flores translation text Laurence Viallet voices Jonathan Capdevielle, Dennis Cooper performance Sylvain Decloitre, Vincent Dupuy, Theo Livesey, Katia Petrowick, Jonathan Schatz, Jonathan Capdevielle, Margret Sara Gudjonsdottir, Elie Hay, Guillaume Marie, Anja Röttgerkamp assistant Anja Röttgerkamp general manager Richard Pierre light manager Samuel Dosière sound manager Adrien Michel special thanks to Christophe Le Bris, Christophe Tocanier, Kenan Trevien, Arnaud Lavisse, David Jourdain thanks to Hortense Archambault and the team of MC93 production and distribution Alma Office, Anne-Lise Gobin, Alix Sarrade, Camille Queval, Andrea Kerr administration Giovanna Rua, Etienne Hunsinger production DACM coproduction Le Quartz - Scène nationale de Brest, Centre Chorégraphique National de Franche-Comté, Centre National de danse contemporaine d’Angers, Les Subsistances/ 2007/ Lyon with the support of Drac Rhône-Alpes, Dicream/ministerie van cultuur en communicatie, Etant donnés/Frans-Amerikaans fonds voor podiumkunsten, Centre Chorégraphique National de Montpellier Languedoc-Roussillon, CN D Centre national de la danse, MC93

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