Everything is not for a person – Newspaper Kommersant No. 39 (7484) dated 03/07/2023

The Berlin theater HAU (Hebbel am Ufer) hosts the festival “Ghosts, Genies and Avatars. About magic in the digital age. One of its main events was the performance of the Frenchman Philippe Ken and his Vivarium Studio, beloved by the Russian public, made together with the Swiss theater Vidy Lausanne. How “Phantasmagoria” differs from Ken’s previous works, tells Alla Shenderova.

“Farm Fatal”, “Farm of Doom” by Philippe Ken was shown in Moscow in December 2021 at the NET festival (for more details, see “Kommersant” dated December 17, 2021). During this time, the Russian cultural landscape has become a steppe, from where all the more or less noticeable buildings were blown away by the wind. Thus, the NET (New European Theatre) festival, which brought up a couple of generations of spectators and brought to us for many years, including the environmentally concerned Vivarium Studio, disappeared, or rather, went down in history.

Ken, by the way, foresaw a lot. Each new work of his begins where the previous one ended. The heroes of Farm Fatal were garden scarecrows who continued to work on the farm after there were no people left on it – only animals and insects. The scarecrows had their own radio station, where they interviewed, say, bees who had lost their bearings due to environmental problems. Between broadcasts, they courted huge eggs. In the finale, it was reported that the eggs decided to move, and the heroes, taking the “pets” in their arms, were going on their way.

In Ken’s new performance, the eggs have hatched into skeletons fluttering beautifully over the stage. To create projections, the director uses the ancient technique Laterna magica, or Magic Lantern. The stage is separated from the audience by a transparent mesh curtain, onto which a detachment of skeletons is projected, whose fallen limbs can be mistaken for sabers. Instead of a saber dance, the mystical music of Pierre Despres sounds, overlaid with a voice asking the audience questions from children’s horror stories: are spirits material, where are they found and what form do they have.

However, skeletons are not responsible for the spirits, or rather, for the spirit. Philip Ken, the designer and director of the performance, worked not only with the scenography, but also with the performers. They were about ten pianos placed around the stage, and two hovering above it. Instrument lids rise and fall: pianos open their mouths, not only making sounds, but also talking about the materiality and spirituality of spirits, while skeletons swarm above them in thick smoke. Sometimes the smoke thickens and spits out a pillar of fire. Here, the spectators, who had fallen asleep, were delighted with a childish dream, wake up. So did the late Mark Zakharov, when his actors gradually ceased to cope. So does Ken, without tormenting living beings in vain and delivering visual pleasure to the public.

More than a hundred years ago, when humanity reached its breaking point, Kostya Treplev, or rather Anton Chekhov, offered the public the same thing – a monologue about the soul of the world and the red eyes of the devil, accompanied by the smell of sulfur for show. But Chekhov’s “The Seagull” was more fortunate: in addition to this monologue, there were people in it.

Another relative of Phantasmagoria, the famous Stifter Thing by Heiner Goebbels (see “Kommersant” dated March 27, 2013) was similar to Ken’s performance even visually. There were also mechanical pianos and smoke. There were also tricks – like the text of the German romanticist Adalbert Stifter that appeared at the bottom of the pool. There was no person on stage either. It was replaced by a voice-over reading a text about Stifter, and an audio recording of an interview with anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, who confesses that he would rather talk with a dog or a cat than talking with any sage.

Levi-Strauss, Bruno Latour, Donna Haraway, Anna Ching – the philosophers who inspire Ken, discovered long ago that man is not the crown of the universe. And a real renewal of earthly civilization should be expected, for example, from mushrooms (according to Jing, they can corrode plastic, spent fuel and harmful metals). So it is. But a performance without people, or rather, without their ridiculous philosophy, turns out to be boring.

It is unlikely that Philip Ken expected that his audience would be bees, mushrooms or domestic animals. Perhaps he still wanted to prove that people on earth are more fun than skeletons. But in any case, this is Ken’s first performance where the stage is cleared of living organisms. Skeletons that exist only in the form of projections look quite contented. But the piano without people seems to be out of tune. In all senses.