Welcome to LOCUS SOLUS, a park as strange and curious as its numerous attractions. Its owner, the scientist and inventor Doctor Martial Canterel, will receive visitors to exhibit his radical experiments and inventions. Should anyone in Europe have forgotten a phase at some stage of their life, Martial Cantarel is able to track down that moment and control it. Among the many bizarre and scary inventions there is an enormous glass cage containing eight human corpses protected from decay.
At Cantarel’s command they rise to reproduce key moments in their lives. LOCUS SOLUS is a place where the world has become utterly transparent, where the past and the future reveal all their secrets. The Polish director Krzysztof Garbaczewski and his team are coming to Germany for their first production in Berlin introducing french Locus Solus author Raymond Roussel as the creator of an artificial intelligence, a form of consciousness as yet unknown infecting us like a virus with the belief in immortality and – even better – a life without work as a result of the continuous production of rituals, which promise to bring healing to exhausted and crumbling social communities.
John Ashbery summarizes Locus Solus thus in his introduction to Michel Foucault’s Death and the Labyrinth: “A prominent scientist and inventor, Martial Canterel, has invited a group of colleagues to visit the park of his country estate, Locus Solus. As the group tours the estate, Canterel shows them inventions of ever-increasing complexity and strangeness. Again, exposition is invariably followed by explanation, the cold hysteria of the former giving way to the innumerable ramifications of the latter.
After an aerial pile driver which is constructing a mosaic of teeth and a huge glass diamond filled with water in which float a dancing girl, a hairless cat named Khóng-dek-lèn, and the preserved head of Danton, we come to the central and longest passage: a description of eight curious tableaux vivants taking place inside an enormous glass cage. We learn that the actors are actually dead people whom Canterel has revived with ‘resurrectine’, a fluid of his invention which if injected into a fresh corpse causes it continually to act out the most important incident of its life.”
With: Tomasz Bazan, Pawel Smagala, Jeanette Spassova, Axel Wandtke, Justyna Wasilewska and Jim Fletcher (virtually). For the dates and times, check the website: volksbuehne-berlin.de
Locus Solus
Wednesday, 06.04. – Sunday, 24.04.2016
Volksbühne | Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz | 10178 Berlin/Mitte
