I received a cryptic message one day. It promised me inclusion in a play with three things: a giant puppet, the Acker Stadt Palast, and the sender. The first two were intriguing, to be sure, but I had seen some of the sender's work over the last year—raucous, daring, inspired—and I felt moreover ready to assent to any piece she was involved in. Plus, I had developed a strong sense of being simpatico while conversing at the strangest housewarming party I've ever been to, and relished the chance to work together.
We had met two years prior during Fantomoj, and I learned that Cristián Lehmann Carrasco1, the quiet-spoken but powerful actor also encountered in that performance, would be co-creating this one, along with Dirk Thiele2, a fine artist, stage designer, and force of nature. They were collaborating with semi-formal group composed mostly of students of stage design at the UdK and some of their guest professors (e.g. Dirk); one permutation of this group was responsible for the two pieces I had seen at the fabled West Germany which had so impressed me.
Both of these thematically-anchored collections of vignettes were as if scripted from the drug-addled nightmares of a cabarettist (or perhaps one of those that some actors get, where one is cajoled into stepping in for another actor in a play one has neither read nor heard of): angsty, back-room meditations on the precariousness of renting, aggressive woo-woo healing, poor stripping, seven copies of a blonde wannabe superstar named Heidi, and a human döner kebab, endlessly dancing in a circle. This is the world which I saw, and, having seen, was immediately captivated, compelled to let myself be swallowed up, by. So when the opportunity came knocking to join their anarchic ranks, I immediately read the few-page brief on a treatment of Sophocles's Ajax, which I didn't particularly understand.
Starting rehearsals just after finishing The Silver Farms, I learned I was to be a puppeteer for the first—well, first ticketed—time, and got quickly to work with the other three puppeteers—Nip Man Teng, Paola Pilnik, Freya Treutmann—and our director to develop a short sequence of movement with a two-metre-tall puppet of the eponymous Danaan warrior. Larger than life-size (although is there such a thing as hyperbole in myth?), it was not what is most often referred to as a puppet, and rather than cord, levers, or any mechanism, is lifted part by part, the anatomically-correct structure supporting the rest in a lifelike manner. Also unlike many styles of puppetry, we as the puppeteers would be visible, and even more rarely, partially functioned as characters ourselves.
Like those other pieces at WestGermany, this was to be one segment of a loosely-connected number of scenes with recurring characters. In it, we played CSIs investigating3 the self-slain body of the larger-than-life hero (Greater a.k.a. Telamonian) Ajax, discovered impaled on his own sword with bloody wool spilling from him. In Sophocles's play, he has committed suicide after killing hordes of sheep instead of the Danaan army, upon whom he wished to be revenged for not being awarded the armour of the expired Achilles. In this version, the awardee, Odysseus, appears as the ultimate heroic gabber and businessman while wrapping up the aftermath of the events. The investigators documenting the death then become the force animating Ajax's spectre, which wordlessly confronts Odysseus as it still seeks to recover the glorious armour (rendered as a gilded car door, hubcaps, and cell phone). Angry and apathetic, Odysseas attacks the phantom, before phoning to arrange a funeral with the appropriate honours.
The rest of the show was an art gallery come alive, an exhibition4 of stolen art (i.e. Kunstraub), which the audience is invited to explore before the proceedings, in which the director and 'der große Galertist' argue about the position of art in society, red-clad nuns deliver a rejection letter from the university, a tribal mask of chocolate is melted, then worn, much classic literature is quoted, and everyone is shot. To top it off, on the final day, the art on display was auctioned off with (and frequently for a) song.
Us puppeteers, other than cordioning off the corner while the audience meandered about and returning for our scene, mostly stayed offstage, and never got to see much of the show directly, nor had we seen rehearsals for the other portions of the show. Discovering during and after the fact what the other theatremakers had put together was therefore both surprising and delightful—the gall they displayed to break the bounds of good taste and theatrical convention, mix intellect with kitsch, to create scenes just because one can, and to make thereby something totally novel—this all impresses me5. Though far from particularly polished—nor was it really meant to be—the unusual circumstances and composition, not to mention playing with the enormous puppet, were an unlooked-for-chance: I think it's a rare and pleasing opportunity to be involved in something that, looking back, one knows will never occur again in the same way. And (perhaps moreover) it was to lead, and is leading, to great things to come... Das Kunstraubkabinett ist tot; lange lebe das Kunstraubkabinett!
At the end, Dirk Thiele gave us each one of his drawings. I still have that drawing on my wall6.