German director Christoph Schlingensief (info on his Bayreuth Parsifal -- photo above -- is here) after being diagnosed with lung cancer, has turned his life into raw material for the stage. Thankfully, the therapies seems to have been successful, and he is now in Vienna, at the glorious Burgtheater.
Peter Michalzik, theater critic for the Frankfurter Rundschau, reports via "Sign and Sight".
Directorially, Schlingensief uses the densely packed revolving stage from "Parsifal" and his "Animatographs" to accommodate all this and more; a cancer cell stands on the stage, and the pulmonary lobe from which it came hangs glowingly in the background. As in Bayreuth, lighting designer Voxi Bärenklau imposes a filmic flickering upon the dark scenery, greyish visual static crackles over images of people and animals; we see leeches and bats - a flickering that consolidates the abundance into a unity.
Composer Arno Waschk, Richard Wagner, and numerous musicians immure it all in a vibrating edifice of sound that repeatedly seizes you by the throat and effortlessly contains Schlingensief's leaps of thought.
Composer Arno Waschk, Richard Wagner, and numerous musicians immure it all in a vibrating edifice of sound that repeatedly seizes you by the throat and effortlessly contains Schlingensief's leaps of thought.
