In 2013, Constanza Macras/DorkyPark created the piece Forest: The Nature of Crisis, a piece that took as point of departure the romantic associations to the forest, the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm, the economic bubbles and economies in crisis. Romanticism is the cult of the individual, the inner spark of divinity that links one human being to another and all human beings to the larger truth. For the Romantic, Nature was, indeed, a constant companion and teacher. She became the stage on which the human drama was played, the context in which man came to understand his place in the universe. Throughout all of Romantic literature, music, and art, Nature is a dynamic presence, a character who speaks in a language of symbols at once mysterious and anthropomorphic. The piece was performed in Müggelwald Berlin as a 4-hour long performative walk trough different notions of space. 

Stages of Crisis was to be a stage version of the materials developed in the forest. The piece was to carry the converted fairy tales and the reminiscence of nature to another place: a supermarket where products present themselves as the further possible vortex to nature. 

The creative process started in 2019, was to be premiered in may 2020 at HAU Hebbel am Ufer and had to be postponed to may 2021. The context of the pandemic hang over the long ago chosen tittle of the work.  

Today, as the crisis deepens economically and ecologically, as humanity moves forward in denial of the harmful effects of digitalisation in the environment and the place of the stage is largely in danger, the reality of theatre is put into a big question mark. The hierarchies of the stage, the fight about which is a “better” or “bigger” stage becomes obsolet when there are only empty theatres; Where are the question about the audience  numbers, who has a bigger platform, and where the hell is the Theatre Meeting?  

The piece transits between over consumption and the global initatives and reactions born in the internet and fed by fear horror vacui and cookbooks in lockdown. Individualism in crisis but without searching to copy nature to find collectivism, a new way that fails because solidarity as such hasn’t established and predatory forms prevail without a clear goal or pray .  

“What happens when the best biologies of the twenty-first century cannot do their job with bounded individuals plus contexts, when organisms plus environments, or genes plus whatever they need, no longer sustain the overflowing richness of biological knowledges, if they ever did? What happens when organisms plus environments can hardly be remembered for the same reasons that even Western indebted people can no longer figure themselves as individuals and societies of individuals in human-only histories? Surely such a transformative time on earth must not be named the Anthropocene!”  (Haraway, Donna J., Staying with the Trouble). 

 

Duration: 90 min.

 

A production by Constanza Macras | DorkyPark in coproduction with HAU Hebbel am Ufer. Funded by Hauptstadtkulturfonds.