by N. Andrew Walsh
“Anything goes here. All are welcome!” That’s the motto of the master of ceremonies at the ominously isolated Nature Theater of Oklahoma at the end of Franz Kafka’s fragmentary Amerika. The rallying cry encapsulates both the myth of America as a land of boundless and egalitarian opportunity, and the ambiguous end of Amerika’s protagonist as he vanishes into the theatre – and has long held a privileged position in German culture. Roman Haubenstock-Ramati, woefully neglected in recent years but formerly one of the forerunners of the European avant-garde, sparked what was at the time called the greatest scandal of 20th-century opera when he took Kafka’s vision seriously and produced a fractured, surreal operatic version of Amerika in 1964. It was so furiously protested at its premiere that the production was struck from the Berliner Festspiele after only two performances.
Amerika’s apocalyptic surrealism has faded in the intervening years, leaving behind only the book’s warm glow of all-embracing openness. Now the Nature Theater in all its complexity serves as a utopian model for an eclectic event presented by the Darmstadt Summer Course’s percussion/composition workshop.
We’re walking through the Herrengarten – a rolling, pastoral pleasure garden with fountains, a small lake, a bicycle cafe, and a friendly woman with an ice-cream cart selling cones to the members of the production team who have come along for the walk. Percussionist Christian Dierstein and composer Lucia Ronchetti co-organized the workshop with Krassimir Sterev of the accordion faculty, and I’ve tagged along on a walkthrough as they asses the technical needs of each of the small events that are to be scattered throughout the park. At the entrance, a performance piece involving gongs and small oriental rugs; further along the promenade, prepared shopping carts deconstruct consumer culture. A group of performers in the lake will play water-gongs, submerging them to create bending pitches. We are informed by the fire department that the summer drought makes the planned campfire by the barbecue grills too great a risk, so Dierstein is working on alternatives.
It’s an unconventional performance format, but the production team doesn’t flinch at the logistics of moving instruments and people around the park for the various actions. The questions centre mainly on the choreography, and the physical limits of the performers: how fast can the accordionists run over uneven terrain with their instruments if they’re worried about tripping? How can the cymbals for the early performances be moved to the next space with limited personnel? Where to stack the rugs? Where to acquire shopping carts? Meanwhile, the text in the programme is jarring: it ranges from the drily descriptive to the poetic, with the blurb for the last piece starting by praising the social habits of crows then ending with their laying eggs in your ears while your sleep. They will, the text warns, eat your brains when they hatch.
Dierstein tells me about his interest in performance outside of normal concert situations, about the performers’ varied artistic backgrounds, about the various spaces of the park: “you come out of civilisation with a clear park[ing lot], with a clear entrance, with a museum situation, and then you go into a park which is still … more an English or French park, and then you go into an open space, passing a cafe, going to the water, and then you end up at this weird situation with the grill … you go from civilization to the jungle.” The production, like Kafka’s Nature Theater, takes on the character of a carefully orchestrated circus, with Dierstein and Ronchetti acting as ringleaders or wilderness guides, shepherding the audience through a chaotic, multifaceted, alluringly ambiguous experience.
Nature Theatre of Darmstadt is Thursday at 1600; meet at the south entrance to the Herrengarten, next to the museum
Talking About Music 